On April 11, along the Avenue of Heroes, bordering the vast cemetery in Kryvy Rih – a major industrial city and mining basin in southern Ukraine – nearly 1,000 Ukrainian flags overlooked as many graves of men and women who have died for the country since the beginning of Russia's invasion in February 2022. The flags fluttered in the cold wind under a threatening sky as around 100 people gathered around the coffin of Marharyta Polovinko, a 31-year-old figure of the Ukrainian artistic avant-garde, killed on April 5 by a drone. The hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was once again in mourning, just days after a missile strike on April 4 killed 20 people, including nine children, in a playground between two apartment buildings.

A brief clearing in the sky stopped the rain. As part of the Orthodox funeral rite, Polovinko's loved ones gently laid their hands on her exposed face. Others kneeled. A soldier with a shaved head and lost gaze clung to the sides of the ceremonial coffin, as if Polovinko were helping him not to fall. The Ukrainian flag and the heap of flowers laid upon her, the priest's incantations, the emotion shared by gathered artists and military and the dull sound of the honorary gunfire were reminders that the country had just lost a singular presence.

The day before, in the kitchen of the red-brick house where she grew up, her mother, Larissa Polovinko, a small woman with dark, unseeing eyes, remembered "a child as obedient as rebellious who loved drawing from a young age and was always on the move." On April 5, it was a call from the Kryvy Rih recruitment center that informed her of her daughter's death. "I tried to convince her not to enlist, she replied: 'Who will protect you if I don't?' You couldn't stop her, she would put you before the accomplished fact."

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