Two Ukrainian artists and a Russian-born and educated philosophy student raised in Odesa, son of a prominent contemporary artist, have been killed on the frontlines while fighting for Ukraine in recent days and weeks. The latest deaths come as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches next month.
Timofey Anufriev, 21, was a member of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a unit made up of Russian nationals fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. The RVC, in an Instagram post on 6 January announcing his death, described him as a hero.
“The war began during his first year at university in St. Petersburg, where he studied philosophy and planned to become a public philosopher,” the post read. “He was disgusted by the fact that many of his peers in Russia pretended that nothing was happening. Therefore, he decided to leave Russia and then join the Russian Volunteer Corps.”
Anufriev, who went by the name Aeneas from Greek mythology, “made a choice dictated by honour,” and served as a stormtrooper, “the most dangerous job in the war”, the post continued.
The RVC said he had been awarded the medal For Assistance to Military Intelligence of Ukraine. “He lived and died like a true knight and poet, in the rays of fiery glory!,” the organisation said.
Anufriev’s father, Sergei Anufriev, who was from a family of Odesa artists, became a key figure in the Moscow Conceptual movement in the 1980s. He co-founded Medical Hermeneutics Inspection with Pavel Pepperstein and Yuri Leiderman, who is also from Odesa. More recently the elder Anufriev and his wife, the curator Katya Chalaya, raised funds for drones for the Ukrainian military at an exhibition in Odesa in May 2025.
Lana Chornohorska, 27, a left-wing journalist and artist known for her anarchist and LGBTQ+ activism joined the Ukrainian military as a volunteer and became a drone operator. Chornohorska was killed on 1 January in southern Ukraine. A memorial ceremony in Kyiv honoring her on 6 January drew a large crowd.
Photographer and artist Yurii Kostyshyn, 48, was killed in action in December. He joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2015, following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine.
After the full-scale invasion he was involved in defense operations around the country, from Kyiv to Donetsk, using his phone camera to record images both of his fellow combatants and of the surrounding nature. His works were shown both in Ukraine and abroad.
Olena Herasymyuk, a writer and combat medic who was friends with Kostyshyn, wrote in a Facebook post: “Thank you for creating beauty where others are afraid even to turn their empty heads. Our pack has been orphaned today. By one Artist. By one Human Being. By one Warrior."
