A 33-year-old Vermonter was killed this month while serving as a medic in Ukraine, according to his parents.
Andrew David Mario, of Brattleboro, died Dec. 3 while assisting an international brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard in the Donetsk region’s Pokrovsky district, said his mother and father, Heidi and Michael Mario.
Mario is believed to be the first Green Mountain State casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“He made his decision to cast his lot with the courageous citizens of that beset nation, very much aware that he was putting his life at great risk,” his parents wrote in their son’s obituary, sent to VTDigger and set for publication in local media.
The family said it learned of Mario’s death from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
“We do not, as yet, know the details,” Heidi Mario told VTDigger.
An autopsy could take place in Kyiv as early as Monday, she said.
Mario left for the war-torn country last summer after being “overcome with an urgent desire to make a meaningful contribution” to Ukraine since a Russian invasion in 2022, his parents wrote in his obituary.
Mario trained with the Ukrainian National Guard before becoming a medic in the village of Zolotyi Kolodiaz alongside other global volunteers.
Russia has been pummeling Mario’s service area — an eastern Ukraine railroad hub and “gateway to the war’s most fiercely contested region,” according to reporters there — for more than a year, with its former population of 60,000 residents reduced to fewer than 1,300.
Mario, born Aug. 26, 1992, attended Guilford Central School for elementary and middle school and Brattleboro Union High School for two years before completing his education through Vermont Adult Learning.
“Although struggling throughout his life with ADHD, depression and an at times tempestuous personality, Andrew was deeply compassionate, with a lively curiosity, especially concerning history and politics, a sly sense of humor and a fiery passion for social justice,” his parents wrote in his obituary.
Mario volunteered at what’s now Brattleboro’s Groundworks Collaborative shelter, supported pipeline protesters by living in a tent at North Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and toured the Canadian province of Ontario with a group raising awareness about missing and exploited First Nations women and girls.
Mario also worked as a bicycle messenger in Philadelphia, a carpenter in California, an organic farmhand in Finland and Serbia, and a support staffer at the McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott South Pole scientific research stations in Antarctica.
His family is planning a memorial gathering for next spring.
“We are heartbroken,” his mother said.
