The Unwritten Names of Kalynivske
In a Kherson region village, a local artist built a memorial to the Russian occupation, leaving a blank space he didn’t live to fill.
At the entrance to the village, we passed a spontaneous roadside mark. My first thought was that this black granite tombstone had to be connected to the full-scale war. But a second later, I caught myself: it was just the lens of professional deformation — t his man died in a car crash. In Ukraine, such roadside markers traditionally commemorate traffic accidents.
Further in, near the local church with boarded-up windows, stands a different kind of memorial. It was made from a Russian MLRS rocket cutting a wall in half — the proximity to the frontline brought the village within reach of such artillery.
The memorial was created by local artist Dmytro Kvetsko, who survived the occupation but passed away at 67. Since I never had the chance to speak with him, I had to piece the story together through local media and a handwritten record kept in the village.
Comparing these sources immediately revealed several discrepancies — most notably regarding the choice of location. The handwritten notes claimed the site was chosen by village consensus “so that parishioners could light a candle and pray for the souls of their fallen neighbors.” On the surface, it sounded logical.
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However, in interviews with journalists Kvetsko gave a far more razor-sharp explanation: at the time, the church belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Erecting a monument to the victims of Russian aggression right outside its doors was meant as an inescapable daily confrontation with the horror that the “Russkiy Mir” (Russian World) had brought to Kalynivske.
For almost nine months of occupation, Russian forces set up a torture chamber in the basement of the local school, where at least 30 civilians were abducted and tortured . The tragedy struck Kvetsko’s family directly: Russian soldiers beat his son nearly to death.
The Russian MLRS rocket on the monument bears the inscription “Never again, never anywhere” — a deliberate variation on the universal post-WWII pledge. In Kalynivske, this phrase carries a heavy historical echo: in 1941, Nazi forces carried out a “Holocaust by Bullets” here, over 1,800 residents.
Another inscription on the monument is a plaque that reads “eternal memory and the kingdom of heaven to the villagers who tragically died during the occupation of our village by the ‘Russkiy Mir’ (Russian world).
Below it, there are no names of tortured or killed residents of Kalynivske.
“When the war ends, I’ll add them,” Kvetsko wrote in the notes.
The war is not over, and Dmytro is gone. Now someone else will have to add to this list.
Originally published at https://grassrootsmemoryproject.substack.com on August 17, 2026.
