It is a year since her heart was broken but army widow Natalya Sidorov’s pain is never-ending.
Her husband, Ukrainian Army Captain Anton Sidorov, was killed by Russian invaders. Natalya invited the Mirror to his funeral, which she attended clutching her five-month-old baby.
She spoke to the Mirror again, from Slovakia, where she now lives with children Rita, 11, Ksenya, seven and Maryana, 17 months.
She said: “Thank you for remembering my husband one year later.”
Natalya, 34, traumatised by war and loss, has had some dark moments.
She said: “It was very difficult for me and my daughters at first. I wanted to die for the first six months. I told my children that either they would behave, or I would go to Daddy.”
Of her partner for 16 years and husband for 11, she says: “Anton was a creative man. He wrote poems.
“He also had a real knack for directing videos. I told him to write a book so he could pass on to people what he had experienced.
“Anton played a lot of musical instruments, played beautifully.
“Can you imagine a man weighing 130 kg, singing and playing the piano passionately? The way his fingers touched the keys, it was incredible.”
She said of their children: “They’re a lot like him, just as creative.”
Anton, who was 36, “was in no condition to move fast”, she says, and was killed on the front line when he “didn’t make it back to the trench”.
He had taken almost parental care of his men, she said, some as young as 20, and spent his own money on equipment. But, despite a six-month investigation into Anton’s death, she has received no compensation.
She said she is surviving on the kindness of strangers.
If the war leads to one country collapsing, she is sure it will be Russia and not Ukraine.
She said: “I think Russia will have the fate that it wanted for us.
“If it doesn’t fall apart completely then they will live in shame and fear of what they did.
“They will be scared all the time for hundreds of years after what they’ve done to us.
“The Russians have a genetic chain of hatred. The Ukrainian people are not like that. I do feel sorry for the Russian mothers, for their children, but compare how the war is fought by our people and by the Russians.
“Many times I’ve seen our soldiers choosing not to finish them off.”
She is not bitter at the Russian people but her feelings are mixed.
She said: “I can’t say that I want to raze Moscow to the ground, no, but I want to raze to the ground those people who killed my husband and people like him.”
Asked if she would ever return home with her family, she said softly: “I would like to, of course.
“I’m not sure about Kyiv. But to Ukraine, of course.”
Then she said: “Oh God, almighty, when will the war end? I had a dream my husband told me it would soon be over.
“I dream about him all the time. I’m still with him... so it’s as if I continue to be married, as if I have a husband.”
