KYIV, Ukraine (news agencies) — “You have no moral right to die.”
That’s what Olha Kurtmalaieva told herself as she lay in intensive care, her body shutting down after emergency chemotherapy. Her cancer had progressed to Stage 4, meaning it had spread to other parts of her body and was now incurable. The pain was unbearable. The doctors weren’t sure she’d make it through the night.
She was facing death alone in the Ukrainian capital, while her soldier husband was in Russian captivity in the more than three-year war.
“If I die now, who will bring him back?” Olha thought to herself. “He has no one else in Ukraine.”
Against the odds, she learned she was in remission last year. But even after multiple prisoner exchanges, including one that freed over 1,000 people, her husband, a Ukrainian marine, remains a captive.
She hasn’t given up. At nearly every exchange, she’s there waiting, one of hundreds of Ukrainian women still trying to bring home their husbands, sons and brothers.
“He’s everywhere in my life,” Olha said. “His (photo) is on my phone screen, in my wallet, on the kitchen wall, in every room.”
Day and night, questions circled in her mind: “What can I do to speed this up? What did I do today to bring him home?”
Olha was just 21 when she learned she had cancer. It was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Stage 2. The tumors were growing but were still treatable.
“At that age, you’re thinking: cancer? Why me? How? What did I do?” she recalled. Her husband, Ruslan Kurtmalaiev, promised to stay by her side through every round of chemotherapy.
When they met, in 2015, he was 21 and she was just 15. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” she said with a wide smile, eyes sparkling.
Their attraction blossomed gradually that summer in Berdiansk, in what is now the Russian-occupied zone in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. Three years later, as soon as she turned 18, they wed.
When they first met, it was not long after Russia illegally seized Crimea, Ruslan’s homeland, in 2014, and also invaded eastern Ukraine. Ruslan, a professional soldier, had already served on the front line.
From the beginning, Olha understood that life as a military wife meant constant sacrifice — long separations, missed milestones, and the uncertainty of war. But she never imagined that one day she would be waiting for her husband to return from captivity.
When she describes Ruslan, tears well up in her eyes. “He’s kind, he has a heightened sense of justice,” she said.
