Ulyana was living at her parents’ home in Ternopil, western Ukraine, when she was told in 2023 that Vlad, her husband of 17 years and a soldier, had died while at a military base near the frontline in eastern Donbas. He was reported to have killed himself.
“Vlad was the most important person in my life,” Ulyana said as she sat at her kitchen table in a two-bedroom apartment in Kyiv. “We lived in harmony.”
Ukraine pays out compensation to war widows and families of fallen soldiers provided certain criteria are met. But in cases where a soldier’s death has been declared suicide, which is classified as a non-combat loss, there is no entitlement to financial support. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Kyiv announced a one-time payment of 15m hryvnias ($340,000) would be offered to families of soldiers killed defending their country on the frontlines. In 2024, the government introduced a second option, which allowed families to claim 2.27m hryvnias, and is typically issued when a soldier dies while on duty, but not at the front.
By introducing a two-tier reparations payment system, the government makes a distinction between soldiers killed during battle on the frontlines and those who die from other causes.
The Ministry of Defense, the government body that handles compensation claims on a case-by-case basis, did not respond to a request for comment.
Ulyana said Vlad’s brigade informed her he died from a self-inflicted shot to the head. She refuses to accept this.
The cause of death on his death certificate was blank when she received it and, with no official cause given, her compensation claim is in limbo.
She hired a lawyer to argue that Vlad had been killed by someone in his brigade and died as a hero of Ukraine, but the court case has dragged on for years.
“I am the wife of a soldier who died. Do I feel pain differently?” Ulyana asked.
Ulyana says she wants recognition not only for herself, but also for the couple’s son, who is now six. They have not received any state social benefits because of Vlad’s status.
It is not known how many war widows have received compensation or how many have sought claims and been rejected. Kyiv does not disclose the data.
But Roman Lykhachov, an independent lawyer, and Legal Hundred, a non-profit organization which gives free legal advice to veterans and their families, said between them they know of more than 1,000 families who claim not to have received the compensation to which they are legally entitled.
Unclear payment rules have left hundreds of war widows and families of fallen soldiers with nothing, according to Yulia Morii, head of Legal Hundred.
Some are complex cases that are not clear-cut, she says. Those being disputed include car crashes, heart attacks after returning from dangerous missions, pneumonia after weeks spent in freezing temperatures in wet trenches, and deaths by suicide. Olena Bieliachkova, an advisor to Ukraine’s Office of the Military Ombudsman, said she has seen cases in which the circumstances surrounding a death were only “superficially” investigated.
“The hardest part is that it’s not always possible to help a family or give them what they’re hoping for,” she said in an email. “It’s understandable they have distrust toward military units, especially in cases where the cause of death is listed as suicide.”
Ulyana is one of a growing number of war widows who say Ukraine has decided their husbands did not die in the “right way” and that their sacrifice was not great enough. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February that 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the war, and they do not know if their husbands were included in that number.
Ulyana has turned to the All-Ukrainian Association of Families of Unrecognized Defenders for support, a non-governmental organization that helps war widows and families struggling to claim compensation. It connects them with lawyers, organizes meetings with the armed forces and lobbies lawmakers, as well as hosting an online community.
“It’s a problem that hundreds of people have,” said Nataliia Vozna, who founded the organization after her son, Anton, a 20-year-old border guard, drowned while patrolling the Dnipro River in northern Ukraine in April 2023.
“Families shouldn’t have to prove their relatives gave their lives, their time, for the country, that they really defended the state,” she said.
Initially, Anton’s death was ruled as not occurring while defending Ukraine, but after two and a half years of fighting in court, his mother eventually received compensation. She knows others are not as fortunate.
“These soldiers might not have died in a way our country considers ‘defending the homeland,’ but still this person died,” she said. “They gave up a lot.”
Anna Conkling is a foreign correspondent covering war and conflict, human rights violations, and climate change.
This is an edited version of a story originally published by Fuller.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
