On August 29, Ukraine remembers those who gave their lives defending the country’s independence and territorial integrity.

For Israelis, the emotional meaning of such a day needs a little explanation. It is not the Ukrainian equivalent of Yom HaZikaron — the histories and traditions are different — but the human language is familiar: names, photographs, families, unfinished lives, and the obligation to remember people as individuals rather than as statistics.

Ukraine chose August 29 because of one of the darkest episodes of the war that began in 2014: the battle of Ilovaisk.

On the morning of August 29, 2014, Ukrainian units began leaving an encirclement along a route that had been agreed with the Russian side. They had been promised safe passage.

Instead, Russian forces opened fire on the withdrawing columns with artillery and other heavy weapons.

According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, 366 Ukrainian servicemen were killed, 429 were wounded, 158 went missing and 300 were taken prisoner during the Ilovaisk operation.

Some of the soldiers died among fields of ripening sunflowers through which the columns were moving.

That is why the sunflower became a symbol of Ukraine’s Day of Remembrance.

But August 29 is no longer only about Ilovaisk. Ukraine now remembers all those who have fallen defending the country since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014.

And this is where another story begins — the reason I went back through the NAnews archives.

Among Ukraine’s fallen were Ukrainian Jews, Israeli citizens, former IDF soldiers, graduates of Jewish schools, and Jewish volunteers from other countries.

There was Polish Jew Daniel Sztyber. Italian-Dutch Jew Benjamin Giorgio Galli. Hungarian Jew Benjamin Asher.

They came from different countries and different Jewish worlds. Some had Ukrainian citizenship. Some had Israeli citizenship. Some had neither. Several simply decided that Ukraine was a country worth defending against Russia’s aggression.

I wanted to know who these people were.

So I began checking names.

An earlier NAnews project had identified 18 fallen defenders of Jewish origin. I then compared those names with a........

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