At a gas station in western Ukraine, three men in their late 20s, friends since childhood, slid into plastic chairs. Exhausted and anxious, they began to sing.
It was March 2022, three weeks after Russian forces invaded, and the men were on their way to war. “Let It Be Cold and Windy” was an old folk tune about weathering adversity that they had sung as boys in a Ukrainian scouts group. Somehow, it brightened the mood.
“In grief and trouble, and the sea of darkness,” they sang, “I will shield you from misfortune with a cloak.”
Their names were Artem, Dmytro and Roman. They had met as boys in the scouts group called Plast, in the western city of Lviv, and forged bonds over mountain hikes, sunburns, scratched knees and bug bites.
Later, boyhood games gave way to college and girlfriends and nights out in Lviv.
Artem Dymyd was a traveler. Addicted to adventure, he was never without his parachute as he sky-dived and base-jumped around the world. Friends called him “Kurka,” Ukrainian for chicken, because of the mop of curly hair he styled into a mohawk as a youth. The nickname stuck. When he got older and led a troop of younger scouts, they called themselves “the eggs.”
Dmytro Paschuk left college to join the French Legion, looking for adventure and a steady income, then came home to open a wine bar in Lviv. He was an entrepreneur full of big ideas. But he was also deeply invested in seeing his small home village near the city thrive, and hoped to start a small farm there.
Roman Lozynskyi studied political science in Lviv and got into local politics before spending time as an intern in the Canadian Parliament. He was elected to the Ukrainian Parliament in 2019, and had started to split his time between Kyiv, the capital, and Lviv
