The Soldier Who Came Back From the Dead

On his first day home after nearly four years in Russian captivity, Nazar Daletskyi took a walk to his village’s small cemetery in western Ukraine. There, he gazed down at his own grave.

Weeks before, Mr. Daletskyi and dozens of others had been freed in an exchange of prisoners of war. He learned from a Ukrainian security officer that a DNA mistake had led his relatives three years ago to bury a bag of remains they thought were his own. On paper, the officer said, Mr. Daletskyi no longer existed.

On Sunday, Mr. Daletskyi, 46, stood over his grave, one of a few dozen in an open field. Six flags adorned the stones for soldiers killed in the war. A seventh flag, marking his own grave, had been removed, as had the remains of the yet-unknown soldier inside it. Piles of soil from the digging were left behind.

“Not everyone gets a chance to see their own funeral and find out who cried the most for you,” Mr. Daletskyi said.

On Feb. 5, the day he was returned to Ukraine, his mother, Nataliia Daletska, 72, received a call. The head of the village knew it was coming, and went to Ms. Daletska’s home to film the moment. Her niece Roksolana Makohin was there and picked up the phone first, screaming with happiness.

When Ms. Makohin said Mr. Daletskyi’s name aloud, his mother covered her face with her hands, asked for the phone and said, “My God, how long I’ve waited for you, my precious child.”

They would have to wait weeks to meet. Mr. Daletskyi, who had been captured by Russian forces in May 2022 as he and his comrades tried to hold a position in Ukraine’s east, was first sent to a military hospital to recover. In captivity, he had been regularly beaten and had lost 35 pounds. At the hospital, he was given the call sign “Resurrected.”

On the day of their reunion, as Ms. Daletska spoke in the living room where her son’s coffin had once stood and where the family would celebrate his return, the toll on her from the government’s mistake was clear. Even with him back, she would never fully recover the health she had lost while mourning him, she said, nor would she forget the grief of visiting his grave for three years.

Russia’s long, brutal war has overwhelmed Ukraine’s system for identifying its dead soldiers, who are estimated by researchers to number more than 100,000.

DNA results are often slow to arrive, and morgues are filled beyond capacity. More than 90,000 people are registered as missing in Ukraine, a majority of them soldiers, according to official data reported by Ukrainian news outlets. Many are presumed dead.

As for those still living but in Russian captivity, Moscow does not provide precise lists. The Ukrainian government says that in every exchange of prisoners there are some who had been listed as missing.

But this is the first time that a soldier turned out to be alive after his family had held his funeral. The Ukrainian government has acknowledged the error and said the family would not have to return the $340,000 it had received in bereavement compensation.

For Mr. Daletskyi to officially reclaim his identity, a court must now recognize that he is alive.

His long journey home began in February, when he boarded a bus with other prisoners of war and was taken to Ukraine. Going down a list, a Ukrainian security officer read each name aloud, checking them off one by one. All but Mr. Daletskyi’s.

Instead, the officer waved him off the bus. He looked at Mr. Daletskyi carefully, then at a photograph of him on his phone.

“He looked at me again and said, ‘Congratulations — you rose from the dead,’” Mr. Daletskyi said in an interview on Saturday near the military hospital where he had recovered.

After hearing about his own burial from the officer, Mr. Daletskyi returned to his seat, white as a ghost, he said.

In May 2022, three months into the war, Mr. Daletskyi’s mother was told that he was in captivity. A year later, a police official in Kharkiv, near the front line, called to say that a genetic test on a set of recovered remains was a 99 percent match with her own DNA.

She refused to believe it. She could not understand how the body had ended up on Ukrainian soil if her son had been in Russian captivity. The Kharkiv official warned that if she did not accept the results, the remains would be buried as an unidentified body.

Ms. Daletska said she had faith in DNA. “I often watch investigative series on TV,” she said. Still, her doubts lingered. The DNA test did not match Mr. Daletskyi’s daughter.

“The policeman apparently said that maybe she isn’t mine,” Mr. Daletskyi said. “I mustn’t forget to go and punch him in the face,” he added.

When Ms. Daletska went to collect the body she had been told was her son’s, she asked to see anything of him that remained. She was told there was nothing but charred remains and ashes.

At his funeral, people asked, “Are you sure that’s him?” She tried to push any doubts away. “If I thought like that, I would go mad,” she said.

Ms. Daletska learned last autumn that her son might be alive, when two soldiers returned from captivity and said they had seen Mr. Daletskyi in prison. Unsure what to believe, she was careful not to let hope take hold.

“Nobody knew what to do,” her niece, Ms. Makohin, 40, said. So the family waited.

When Mr. Daletskyi finally returned home on Sunday, dozens of people filled the square near the village hall, singing songs as children ran around holding Ukrainian flags.

His mother stood in the crowd, breathing heavily. She struggled to make sense of her emotions, smiling, then crying, then smiling again. When a car stopped and her son opened the door, she burst into tears and rushed to him. They embraced. She leaned her head on his chest, and he kissed it.

He looked happy and bewildered. As people lined up to hug him, they asked if he remembered them. “Come on, I was away for only four years,” he said, and the crowd laughed. People whispered to one another: “Does he look like Nazar? Is that really him?”

Afterward, Mr. Daletskyi took his mother’s arm, and together with his large family of nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles, they went home. A table was set, while children ran through the house. “Hey, Gran, Nazar has two lives now!” shouted his 9-year-old cousin, Hnat.

“Indeed,” Ms. Daletska said. “We will now celebrate his birthday on Feb. 5,” she added, referring to the day her son first called her after his long captivity.

In the room where Mr. Daletskyi now sat on a sunny Sunday, with noise and song swirling around him, his coffin had rested three years before in mournful solitude. The same people who surrounded him now were there then, offering words of support to his mother. She had sat beside the coffin, crying and staring at a memorial photograph of her son, which she would later burn.

Oksana Parafeniuk contributed reporting.

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