On March 5, 2022, Zhanna Kameneva got behind the wheel to drive a colleague, her 14-year-old daughter and a neighbor out of occupied Bucha. She had been volunteering since 2014, delivering aid to boarding institutions in Donetsk and Luhansk and knew what it meant "to go where no one goes." This time the route — from Bucha to Kyiv — proved fatal.
"An enemy tank is coming at us" — this was the last SMS Zhanna's husband, Hennadiy, received from her at around ten in the morning, almost at the intersection of Yablunska and Vokzalna streets.
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The car was fired upon from armored personnel carriers (APCs) and, likely, from automatic weapons. The vehicle burned out completely. All four — Zhanna, Mariya Ilchuk, Tamila and 14-year-old Anya Mishchenko — were killed. The case is being investigated by Ukrainian and international investigators.
Posthumously Zhanna Kameneva was awarded the Order "For Courage" III class — the decoration was presented to her husband.
The husband's brother went through two cycles of war
Mykhailo Kamenev, Hennadiy's brother, follows a different trajectory. A machine-gunner with the call sign 'Kaktus,' he went east as early as 2014 with the 93rd Separate Airborne Brigade, received ATO veteran honors, then returned to civilian life. After February 24, 2022, he again joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
On October 26, 2023, he was killed in the Donetsk region. There are almost two years between Zhanna's death and Mykhailo's. Between their plaques on the wall — just a few meters of facade.
What a plaque on the wall of a residential building means
Memorial plaques in Bucha are not just a municipal ritual. A city where the occupation lasted more than a month and where mass killings of civilians were recorded is still gathering its dead by name. Zhanna and Mykhailo are not symbols on a poster, but real people from a particular entrance, who chose different forms of participation and paid the same price.
- Zhanna — a civilian volunteer, killed while evacuating civilians during the occupation
- Mykhailo — a veteran of two wars, killed at the front during his second call-up
- Both — residents of the same building, whose names now appear on its facade
Bucha has made a choice to record such people by name and publicly — not in a memorial park on the outskirts, but on the walls where they lived. The question is whether the city will be able to maintain this register until the end of the war: the number of plaques on Bucha's buildings continues to grow.
