Global Courant 2023-05-03 07:10:32
Two Canadians who signed up to fight for the Ukrainian army are being remembered for their bravery after being killed last week.
Cole Zelenco, a 21-year-old from St. Catharines, Ont., and 27-year-old Kyle Porter from Calgary, Alta. had defended the city of Bakhmut for weeks and had fought in one of the bloody battles of the war. Last Wednesday they died in a bunker under heavy Russian artillery fire.
Both men fought with Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade and were close friends, as they were the only two Canadians in their battle group.
“Cole was a very special person. He had a really nice sense of justice for someone so young and he was a protector,” Zelenco’s mother, Lynn Baxter, told CTV News on Tuesday.
That sense of justice led Zelenco, who had previously served in the Canadian Forces, to enlist to fight in Ukraine. This was his second tour, as he had been back in the war zone since late October.
“He felt like he had a lot of work to do there. A lot of unfinished business. There were still a lot of people to take care of. He was just thinking about other people all the time,” his sister Elena Zelenco told CTV. News.
Porter first made the trip to Ukraine as a search and rescue worker, after serving as a medic in the Canadian Forces. Last year he told CTV News Calgary that he felt obliged to offer his services in Ukraine after seeing images of the war on television.
“I saw those images and I thought, ‘that’s not fair.’ I have equipment, I have training, I have experience and the fact that I’m sitting here enjoying the benefits of where I live compared to these people and their families I knew I had to do what I could to get some cosmic level of justice,” Porter told CTV News Calgary March 2022.
Paul Hughes, a Canadian humanitarian in Ukraine, was among those who helped recover Porter’s body in Bakhmut and took his body to the morgue in Kharkiv.
“I think Canadians should know that this guy here is a hero,” he said in an interview with CTV News. “They need to know that their boys were loved and expected and that this country thinks they are heroes.”
Zelenco and Porter would be the fourth and fifth Canadian volunteer soldiers to die in Ukraine since the war began. Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, paid tribute to the two Canadians on social media.
“No words can express our gratitude for their sacrifice,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Eternal Memory and Eternal Glory for Warriors.”
The two men will be honored in separate ceremonies in Ukraine this week before their bodies are returned to Canada. Loved ones in Canada are planning funerals in the coming weeks.
With files from CTV News Calgary
