When Mariia Pankova last exchanged messages with her close friend Pavlo in December, she had no idea that he was among the Ukrainian troops fighting in Russia’s Kursk region.
She found out when a fellow soldier told her several days later that her friend, Pavlo Humeniuk, 24, a combat engineer in Ukraine’s 47th Magura brigade, had gone missing near the village of Novoivanivka in Kursk on December 6.
Almost four
