Amid a sea of crosses bearing Lithuanian tricolours, one stood out. Marked with a blue-yellow trident, it carried the name of the only Ukrainian volunteer to fight and die alongside Lithuania‘s anti-Soviet partisans – Ivan Resekovski.
“We had to wait 78 years for the Ukrainian anthem to ring out for the first time next to our national hymn,” said Tautvydas Kontrimavičius, a journalist and historian who helped compile findings about Resekovski.
Last Friday, a salvo from Lithuanian troops and prayers by an Orthodox priest marked the opening of the ceremony in Troškūnai, central Lithuania, to consecrate a cross dedicated to the largely forgotten Ukrainian partisan.
“We gathered here today not because we would like to honour a Ukrainian or to pay special attention to one of the dozens of Lithuanian partisans commemorated at this memorial site,” said Kontrimavičius. “Instead, we have gathered here today to honour one young man’s personal decision that sealed his fate.”
Little is known about Resekovski, the only recorded Ukrainian partisan to take part in Lithuania’s armed anti-Soviet resistance movement. For years, his remains lay in a mass grave alongside other fighters.
“We still don’t know where Resekovski came from or anything about his relatives in Ukraine, or whether anyone tried and failed to find him, or maybe that someone was still looking for him,” Kontrimavičius said, adding that finding more information remained a task for the future generations.
Resekovski was brought to Lithuania in 1940 or 1941 as a conscript in the Red Army when it first occupied the Baltic countries. When the Nazis invaded in June 1941, he did not flee east.
He then became a prisoner of war to the occupying Nazi regime, which handed him over to a farmstead of Jonas Pūkas’ family as a de facto slave. The workforce was scarce in the region and the Nazis saw forced labour as a way to fill the gap, according to Raimundas Totoraitis, one of the descendants of the family.
Soon he became close to and welcomed by the family of Jonas Pūkas.
When the Soviets returned in 1944, Resekovski joined Pūkas and another Lithuanian man, Jurgis Mačiulis-Dūdutis, to form a partisan cell. They joined the anti-Soviet resistance and fought as part of the Šarūnas Regiment.
But in 1946, they were betrayed and killed by Soviet troops and their local collaborators.
Although the two Lithuanian men were identified by their families, no one knew much about the Ukrainian fighter. For years, he was only referred to as a Russian POW.
However, his memory lived on in local tales.
“He was remembered as a short, humorous, young man who could have been born sometime in the 1920s,” wrote Kontrimavičius in a summary published online, compiled mostly from information uncovered by Totoraitis.
Resekovski’s name was identified only when the son of the killed Lithuanian partisan, Albinas Pūkas, returned home from a Soviet labour camp.
Totoraitis later tried to locate Resekovski’s family members in Ukraine, but without success. The exact motivations as to why Resekovski decided to join the partisans also remained unclear.
“My grandmother would say that he went off with the partisans after saying he would not fight for the Russians, but only for Lithuania. Because my grandmother did not speak Russian, I concluded that he had already learnt the Lithuanian language,” Totoraitis told LRT.lt during the ceremony.
It’s also possible that he was an ethnic Ukrainian from other parts of the USSR. According to Totoraitis, his grandmother would sometimes mention the name of Voronezh, a Russian city some 200 kilometres from the present-day Ukrainian border.
“It’s a shame that I did not get more information,” Totoraitis said, adding that everyone in his family kept silent about their role in the anti-Soviet resistance. At the time, the fear of betrayal meant families held back from sharing details even with their children.
On Friday, the cross for Ivan Resekovski was consecrated by Vitalijus Mockus, the head of the Constantinople Patriarchate Church in Lithuania, which split from Moscow following the February 2022 invasion.
“We think this would be most acceptable for Ivan Resekovski’s soul,” said Kontrimavičius.
‘I was sure I would die’
Lithuania and Ukraine had some of the longest-lasting armed partisan movements against the Soviets, which were suppressed in both countries in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively.
Historians in Lithuania and Ukraine draw parallels between the movements, with some recorded instances of cross-border cooperation.
In one example, Lithuanian and Ukrainian partisans fought together in the ill-fated Kengir Gulag uprising in present-day Kazakhstan in 1954. The Soviets ultimately put down the insurrection, with up to several hundred deportees killed in the process. Many historians credit this uprising, among others, for ending the repressive Gulag regime.
There were also cases of Ukrainian partisans trying to break through to Lithuania to coordinate their resistance movements. One such attempt came in 1950 when 12 Ukrainian resistance members set out to reach the Baltic states via Belarus.
“They carried proclamations calling on Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians to coordinate their resistance with the Ukrainians,” Gintaras Vaičiūnas, a historian at the state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, said during the ceremony.
They also called on the Baltic fighters to smuggle their literature to Ukraine, as well as cooperate with Ukrainian deportees in labour camps and prisons.
“Unfortunately, the Soviet secret police intercepted them in Belarus – some were killed, others returned to Ukraine,” Vaičiūnas added.
In Lithuania today, only two former fighters are still alive to remember the resistance first-hand. Jonas Kadžionis, one of them, attended the ceremony in Troškūnai. It is also where he and Resekovski fought against the Soviets – in the same woods now surrounding the cemetery.
Kadžionis joined the fight in 1948 when the rest of his family was deported to Siberia. Taking up a weapon to protect himself from the Gulag was his only choice.
“I received a letter from my mother who said – child, die in Lithuania, don‘t go to die in Siberia, it‘s much worse because there is a famine here,” Kadžionis told LRT.lt.
For him, the resistance movement in the years after the end of the Second World War was no longer about liberation – it was an attempt at survival. “This was the dawn of the partisan movement,” Kadžionis said, adding that no one harboured any illusions about victory over the Soviets.
“People sacrificed themselves [in the fight] led by patriotism, but also human feelings because we all knew each other, we went to schools together, we held parties and went dancing together,” said Kadžionis.
This might also be one of the many ways to explain Resekovski’s own decision to join the Forest Brothers.
“I was sure I would die,” Kadžionis said, but it was still better than submitting to the Soviets – “We knew that our situation was still not too bad, because we had weapons and we could resist.”
At the time, people feared Siberia more than death, Kadžionis added.
“It’s very important to never doubt the victory of truth,” he said. “I am now very happy that the Ukrainians are fighting back.”
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