"I am a mother to them." A soldier who lost her son endured captivity and has now returned to life.

Bones Stuck in My Throat

57-year-old serviceman Svetlana Vorova is heading off on vacation. In Odessa, she has a daughter and five grandchildren. Just before the train, there's time for a conversation. It all begins with sausage—a typical homemade blood sausage.

In Russian captivity, the women nostalgically recalled homemade food. One of the captives even wrote down recipes until they took her pen and notepad. Some shared how to pickle cucumbers, others talked about baking cakes, while Svetlana spoke about blood sausage. How many times she made it in her apartment on the tenth floor!

“In the 90s, my mom and I would buy blood, intestines, and pig heads at the Odessa market—what delicious homemade blood sausage we made! We would roast 20 kilograms overnight and sell it the next day. People came to us, knowing it was finger-licking good,” she recalls.

In captivity, the woman would give bread to her cellmates who couldn’t sleep from hunger. But she couldn't swallow more than a crust—she just couldn't.

“In Yelenovka it was forbidden to pick plums off the ground that fell from the trees. For that, you could be sent to solitary confinement. We were fed a soup made from water with only cabbage floating in it or a piece of potato. It was like a watery cabbage soup,” she explains. “Or porridge. They added tiny uncleaned fish stuffed into the grain, like sprats, with bones and guts. It was all unsalted and unseasoned. And you had to swallow that slop in two minutes.”

The guard walked quickly along our nine women’s cells. He only handed out bowls—then immediately turned to collect them back. If you managed to gulp something down, great; if not, that was your problem. Some girls couldn’t eat—the bones stuck in their throats. They ended up throwing that mush into the toilet. The bowls had to be not only empty but also clean!”

What tormented Svetlana the most was the lack of water. Not for washing or laundry. Such luxury was allowed once a week: they were given 5 to 10 minutes for a shower. Six women would rush under two showers and, pressed together, would wash and do laundry at the same time.

But there was nothing to drink. The tap in the cell ran with technical water, which was impossible to even put in your mouth. Sometimes they were brought supposedly clean drinking water in bottles, but it had to be strained through cheesecloth—it was that filthy.

Due to dehydration and malnutrition, the woman lost 30 kilograms in 11 months. In the video after her captivity, she was unrecognizable. The skin on her face had sagged and hung in patches. At that time, she looked about 70, even her eyes resembled those of an elderly person. She says she was frightened when she saw herself.

Now Svetlana has regained her voluptuous figure and liveliness, and her face has smoothed out and filled with color. Yet in her memory—an ocean of pain and sorrow.

Burying Her Son in an Open Casket

Her firstborn, Sasha, died in the war. He was one of the first Azov fighters, joining as a volunteer in 2014 when the battalion was just forming and getting on its feet. A few months later, just before the new year of 2015, her 27-year-old son came home: thin and determined.

“First of all,” he said, “I’m signing a contract with Azov. Secondly, I’m proposing to my girlfriend.”

He asked his mother to buy an engagement ring—they had such a trusting relationship. And when his girlfriend said yes, he was over the moon: “Mom, I’m so happy!”

On February 15, 2015, Alexander Kutuzakiy, known by his callsign Kutuz, set out with his brothers to retrieve wounded comrades from the battlefield. This was when the Ukrainian forces began their offensive near Shirokino. The vehicle Kutuz was in fell into an ambush—it was fired upon.

The “Kadyrovtsy” took the bodies and mutilated them. Alexander was returned with his ears cut off. His mother decided to bury him in an open casket.

“Not everyone at that time understood that a war was going on. A closed casket for a soldier is one thing: a funeral like any other. But it’s another thing to see a mutilated body. I wanted to convey to people who we are dealing with. That it wasn’t enough for the Russians to destroy us—they desecrate the dead,” Svetlana explains.

When I asked her, “How are you now, nine years later?” she begins to respond calmly, but tears start to flow one after another:

“It cannot pass. This is my child, whom I carried, gave birth to, and raised. Love doesn’t just disappear, and neither does the pain. You just learn to live with it.”

Before her son died, Svetlana lost her father and father-in-law. Meanwhile, her divorce was ongoing: her third husband had found someone else. Darkness enveloped the woman—it felt like the walls of the room would collapse over her head like a house of cards.

Two of her younger children—Valeria and Yakov—helped Svetlana recover. It took two years. But all this time, the woman thought about continuing her eldest son’s mission—going to fight in place of Sasha (as she calls him).

“Mom is Free, Mom Can Go to the Army”

She was able to do so in 2020 when her youngest son got married. Her daughter had created a family even earlier.

“Mom is free, mom can go to the army,” she declared amidst their hysteria.

She left “Ukrzaliznytsia,” where she worked as a leading engineer, and joined Azov. They took her on as a clerk in the supply service at a base in Urzuf, Donetsk region.

She chose the callsign—Gracia. Together with the four-years-older Tequila and a 70-year-old medic, she was the oldest in the regiment.

In the army, Svetlana gradually gathered information about her deceased son: “They spoke of him as a very honest person, respected by his comrades. And he was one of the youngest. I am proud that he grew up to be a real man.”

After the full-scale invasion began, Svetlana, like the other Azov fighters, found herself at Azovstal.

“I, like the other girls, cooked, cleaned, and washed toilets so the guys wouldn’t have to think about it, as they had their own combat tasks. We baked bread for hundreds of people: explosions all around, everything that could fall on our heads, while we were kneading dough. Sometimes it seemed like that was it: we wouldn’t make it out alive. Then I recorded a video will for my children, said goodbye, and asked them to support each other,” Svetlana recalls.

The commander offered the women a chance to leave through one of the green corridors. Four of those who agreed made it safely to their own. Gracia stayed:

“I realized I was staying: who would feed the guys?”

She spent 86 days at Azovstal.

Lost 30 kg in 11 Months

Then came the order to surrender. The women from Azovstal were placed in the disciplinary isolation unit (DIZO) in Yelenovka. There, around a hundred Ukrainian female prisoners from various battalions were held under terrible conditions. Thirty women were crammed into a six-person cell. Two slept on the beds, while the others slept on tables or under them, under benches, near the toilet. You lie there, and mice jump over you.

The toilet was a hole in the floor, where waste would rise up and could spill out. The stench was terrible and constant. Svetlana had never cleaned so much in her life as she did in captivity. The walls and floors had to be scrubbed over and over.

They were not physically tortured like the men, but they were morally humiliated: they were forced to sing the Russian anthem ten times a day and songs by Gazmanov or Bakina. They were also forced to do a thousand squats a day. Those who couldn’t or fell would be sent to solitary confinement.

The women were called for interrogations, trying to extract conf