Looking back, it should have been obvious—the warning wasn’t subtle. When I texted my friend, the frontline commander I called Fin—I always used his army call sign, not his civilian name—the screen stared back at me ominously: “Last seen January 3, 2026”—at least three weeks earlier. I told myself it was nothing. He’d probably changed his phone number or switched to a different carrier. But my explanations felt thinner and thinner as the hours ticked by. Finally, in the evening, I started texting others who knew him, and the news came the next day from his unit’s press officer: “Code 200. Fin has been killed in action.”
Later that week, still battling shock and grief, I read in the media that Volodymyr Zelensky, long hesitant to reveal casualty figures, had finally gone public with a number. According to the president’s office, 55,000 Ukrainians, volunteers and regular soldiers, have fallen in battle since the Russian invasion in February 2022. This is a tiny fraction of the enemy total. Ukrainian and Western analysts estimate 1.2 million Russians killed, wounded, and missing. But both numbers looked different to me in the stark light of my friend’s sacrifice.
