In Ukraine’s Poltava, soldier buries a father he thought safe from war

It was the son fighting on the front lines that everyone worried about — but then his father died first, blown apart in a missile attack 100 miles from the battlefield.

And so on Saturday, as funeral after funeral began in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava — where 58 people at a military institute were killed in a strike on Sept. 3 — Oleksandr Horodnytskyi drove to the morgue to pick up the father he’d hoped to protect by going to war. Now, he had five days of leave from his assault brigade to process his grief and bury the man who raised him.

One of the deadliest single bombardments of the war left dozens of victims to be buried more than 100 miles from the front lines.

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