US family in Kyiv mourns son killed in war, upset by Trump's lurch to Russia

By Anastasiia Malenko

KYIV (Reuters) - For the mother of U.S. veteran Ethan Hertweck, travelling to Kyiv to collect the body of her son who was killed in Russia's war in Ukraine in 2023 has rammed home the realities of the conflict.

It has also made her question U.S. President Donald Trump's handling of the crisis since returning to power. He labelled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a "dictator" and said Ukraine was responsible for a war which Russia began.

Trump spoke directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin before Zelenskiy, and the United States has been holding talks with Russia with no involvement of Ukraine or Europe.

"I don't understand how he could make it sound like Putin is not a dictator and that Zelenskiy is," said Leslie Hertweck, who voted for the Republican candidate in November's election. "So, we were upset, definitely."

Trump has since distanced himself from those comments. But his lurch towards Moscow in a war in which the U.S. has been Kyiv's most important ally has caused consternation in Ukraine and among Washington's traditional allies.

Leslie Hertweck said she had been trying to communicate what was happening in Ukraine to Americans, some of whom she said did not understand the seriousness of the threat Russia posed.

"Our hotel was shaking," she told Reuters, recounting explosions this week as Russia launched some of its biggest drone attacks of the war. "That made it really real to me, and what people face here."

"So (we are) trying to relay that to people in the States and say: 'Oh, the war is very real.' Now you can't talk to anyone who has not lost at least one person, whether it's a family member or close friend from this war."

'THE LOUDEST SIGH'

After health problems prevented her son from continuing to serve with U.S. marines, he went to the Polish border where he helped women and children fleeing Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion started in February, 2022.

With a nagging feeling he could do more a year later, he got his combat medic license and crossed into Ukraine to help save lives on the battlefield.

Before leaving for Ukraine in 2023, his father asked if there was anything he could say or do to make him not get on the plane and he refused.

"If I don't go there to fight for their freedom as an American, then who's going to do it?" his mother recalled him saying about the decision.

Ethan Hertweck died in December, 2023, after he rushed to help an injured friend near the besieged town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine. He had continued to aid those around him after Russian forces struck him, family and friends said. He was 21.

That was the start of the longest 14 months of his mother's life. She did not know whether they would ever get his body back.

For over a year, she bonded with families of other foreign fighters and organizations providing support, including the R.T. Weatherman Foundation.

She finally received a call in February that her son's remains had been secured in an exchange. She gave no further details of the process but said: "All I know is I took the loudest sigh I ever had done, and I started crying."

At her son's memorial on Friday, family members and a small crowd of Ukrainian and foreign fighters who knew him gathered on Maidan Square in central Kyiv and formed a semi-circle around his coffin draped in the Ukrainian and American flags.

His marine corps community plans to bury him at the Garden of Valor in California.

As attendees spoke about him and the war more broadly on Friday, Leslie Hertweck looked on at the portrait of her son and wiped away tears.

Kateryna Poniaieva, a friend who worked with him in Ukraine, knelt and cried next to the coffin while saying goodbye.

"He always seemed so mature to me, and when I found out his age I understood that he is still a kid who came to defend my child, my home, my country," she said.

(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Timothy Heritage)