Three years ago, on April 17, 2023, during assault operations near the village of Pavlivka in the Donetsk region, People’s Deputy of the 8th convocation Oleh Barna was killed.
Petro Poroshenko shared warm memories of his friend and comrade. “Oleh Barna always fought for Ukraine and its free future. It’s been three years since he’s been gone, and it is still hard to get used to. His death back then was a blow to me, a complete surprise, although a deadly threat is everywhere on the front line. Until his last breath, he carried out what he believed in: Ukraine must be strong and independent. And there is no place for anything Russian on our land,” the fifth President writes.
“Oleh was always among the first: he had a hot heart, was honest and straightforward. He never stood aside when Ukraine called: neither when he was a student and participated in hunger strikes, nor when he became a People’s Deputy. In February 2014, we were together on the Maidan. Back then, in Mariinsky Park, Oleh was wounded during clashes with law enforcement officers. He showed that he was not afraid to shed his own blood for the dignity and freedom of Ukrainians, for our European future. That is how principled I knew Oleh to be throughout the time of our friendship and state work,” writes Poroshenko.
“And Oleh was also very stubborn and always insisted on his own way. Despite his injuries, he went as a volunteer to the front when the war began in eastern Ukraine. He took up arms in 2022 as well, although he was already unfit for service, and pushed to be accepted specifically into an assault brigade. ‘We must leave our children a protected, safe country so that they no longer know what war and murder, which the Russian boot brings, are,’ Oleh said. Friend, you have been in the heavenly host for a long time now, and we here are continuing your fight,” writes Petro Poroshenko.
Oleh Barna was an active public and political figure, starting from the student hunger strike in 1990, known as the “Revolution on Granite,” to the Revolution of Dignity, where he was wounded during shelling on February 18, 2014. In July 2014, he volunteered for the ATO zone. After the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, he went to the front again. First, he served in the 44th Separate Artillery Brigade named after Hetman Danylo Apostol, then in the 68th Separate Jager Brigade named after Oleksa Dovbush. He carried out combat missions in the Donetsk sector of the defense.
In August 2023, along with the fighters of his assault group, Oleh Barna was posthumously awarded the Order “For Courage,” 3rd class.
In October 2023, Co-chair of the “European Solidarity” faction Iryna Gerashchenko reported that the wife of Oleh Barna, who died on the front line, received a court ruling in a lawsuit for the protection of honor against a journalist from the “1+1” TV channel. As the deputy emphasized, the court issued its decision in April, but the TV channel did not comply. It did not publish a refutation of the false information that it had spread against Oleh Barna at the time.
“Oleh Barna won the court case. Posthumously. Against the lying journalists of the ‘Pluses’ who bullied him. Oleh’s wife, Mrs. Olha, recalls that in his last SMS, her husband asked the family to continue the court cases to protect his honest name,” wrote Iryna Gerashchenko on her Telegram channel.