Russia-Ukraine war: what it feels like at a street funeral in Lviv

In a country at war everything can change from one moment to another.

But that idea had been erased from my head while I was walking around Lviv on Saturday morning, seeing churches, buying souvenirs, stopping for a cappuccino and a cake.

in the environment

.

Until I went down a street, heard gloomy music, and came across about a

, heads bowed.

for 24 hours in this elegant city

in western Ukraine, on the border with Poland, and suddenly I found it.

I looked over the heads of the crowd and saw three columns of

, heading for the entrance of a church.

Only the bells and the

profundo of an invisible choir interrupted the silence.

I didn't have to ask, although they confirmed it to me later.

They were the bodies of

who had died on the front lines, far from their families—a thousand kilometers, maybe more—in the east of the country.

I walked into the packed church and exchanged glances with three or four people, as if asking, "Is it okay for me to be here?"

Clearly I was a foreigner but his eyes told me no, that he was calm, that he was not an intruder, that he was welcome.

I want to believe that they saw that I shared, even a little,

.

And I thought,

, a kind of professional tourist, what would they feel?

At the end of the mass, when the soldiers came out with the three coffins on their shoulders, I saw for the first time, parading behind, the relatives of the dead boys.

A dozen old people crying with tissues in their hands,

, and a girl with red eyes, maybe a cousin or a little sister.

To one side I saw a lady in her 50s, hair dyed metallic red, dressed in a military uniform.

She was crying too but I got closer.

Luckily she didn't take offense and--more luck--she spoke some English.

How he felt?

The question is banal, yes, but what else was there?

"I feel

," he replied.

"I feel

."

Did you know the dead boys?

"No.

I didn't know them.

But this is

I've come here

and I'm crying for everyone equally."

What for? I asked him.

What have these young people died for?

Ukrainian soldiers carry the coffins of their fallen counterparts through the center of Lviv.

Photo Reuters / Pavlo Palamarchuk

“That!” he replied, almost shouting.

"That.

So that?

So that?".

She paused for a moment, pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and said:

." And what would be the answer?

“Who

”.

The lady, whose name was Oksana, looked at me as if saying how ridiculous and how outrageous that young people are dying for such an absurd cause.

And, according to her, so impossible.

"What this animal does not understand is that it will never win because with each death,

." After the funeral I went to the station to take a train to Kyiv. On the platform I saw a young soldier and his girlfriend hugging. They didn't stop hugging until half an hour later, when the train left. He got on and she, like in the movies, blew kisses at him through the window and ran behind his carriage when we started to leave. Inevitable not to think if the next time she would see him it would be in a church inside a coffin.

Street funerals are repeated in the cities of the invaded Ukraine.

Photo Yuriy Dyachyshyn / AFP

At the funerals of Russian soldiers, people's response to the question how they feel will be the same: anger and pain.

To the question "for what" perhaps

.

The difference is that when Oksana and the relatives of those killed at the Lviv funeral get over their tears and stop to reflect, they will say that they died for a noble cause: to protect their own from the northern barbarians.

.

* From Lviv, Ukraine.

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