Back in Kyiv, Natalia clings to the arm of a friend, as grave diggers shovel fresh earth onto her husband’s coffin then slot a wooden cross into place on top.
A photograph of Vitaly shows him smiling, posing beside a yellow sunflower.
Natalia is relieved to have her husband close again where she and their daughter, Vitalina, can visit his grave safely.
“[She] watches videos of him, looks at photos and she loves him very much even though they never met,” Natalia smiles.
She also hopes to tell her husband soon that she’s pregnant using the sperm the couple had frozen specially at a clinic, just a few days before Vitaliy was killed.
Many soldiers now do the same before heading for the front.
It’s a brutal fact, but Natalia says none of Vitaliy’s soldier friends made it to his reburial, because so many of them, too, are now dead.
Ukraine has paid an immense price already for four years of all-out war.
Ceding land to Russia that it already controls is one thing: an option now quietly accepted by many.
But Natalia can’t bear the thought of Russia taking more territory, including the town where she and Vitaly lived and were in love.
She has “no doubt” her husband would have wanted the army to fight on, not concede now.
“Russia may pause for a year, then there will be another breakthrough and they’ll be in Kharkiv,” Natalia says.
“I just don’t believe Russia will stop.”
Additional reporting by Mariana Matveichuk, Anastasiia Levchenko and Paul Pradier