Ukrainian Catholic University student killed by Russia honored with memorial scholarship

(OSV News) -- A Catholic university community has come together to create a scholarship in memory of a student and her family who were killed by a Russian missile.

On March 18, the Ukrainian Catholic University Foundation announced that an endowed scholarship fund honoring Daryna Bazylevych and her family had collected $163,441 to date.

Bazylevych, known as Daria, had been a second-year student in the university's culture studies program. She was slain in a Sept. 4, 2024, Russian strike on the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where the university is based -- one day after OSV News had traveled from the campus to the southern city of Odesa on a pastoral tour of Ukraine with Metropolitan Archbishop Borys A. Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia.

Also among the seven killed in the attack were Bazylevych's mother, Evgenia, and her two sisters, Emilia and Yaryna, ages 7 and 21 respectively.

Only the family's father, Yaroslav, survived. He, the university and the Plast National Scout Organization of Ukraine -- of which his daughter had been a member -- launched the endowed scholarship fund.

The UCU foundation released news of the fund a day ahead of what would have been Bazylevych's 19th birthday, noting that the original goal of $100,000 had been exceeded, with close to $92,000 donated within Ukraine and Europe, almost $62,300 from the U.S. and more than $10,000 in Canada.

The donations have already underwritten one annual and one half-year scholarship for two students of the university's culture studies program, the foundation reported.

In its announcement, the university's foundation included memories of Bazylevych shared by fellow students and instructors.

UCU assistant professor of culture studies Marta Kuziy, Bazylevych's adviser and tutor, remembered her slain student as "a very shining, joyful girl!"

Childhood friend Erika Dzhymshyashvili recalled Bazylevych's final excursion, a trip with friends to the Carpathian Mountains. During the gathering, Bazylevych "continued climbing, not stopping, as if there were no difficulty. … No matter how dark, she continued. No matter how dense the foliage, she climbed," said Dzhymshyashvili.

Writing a few months before her death, Bazylevych thanked benefactors from whom she had received funding for her studies, saying, "Many challenges lie before me, but I am ready for them and eagerly wait to face them."

A number of UCU students have been killed since the start of Russia's February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which continues attacks launched in 2014, and which has been declared declared a genocide in two joint reports from New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.

The same day Bazylevych was killed, another UCU student was laid to rest, having been killed in action while battling invading Russian forces, Metropolitan Archbishop Gudziak, president of UCU, told OSV News.

In May 2024, first-year UCU student Iryna Myronenko and her 12-year-old daughter Mariya were killed in a Russian strike on a Kharkiv supermarket.

Also among the fallen are psychology graduate Oles-Yulian Shcherba and Artem Dymyd, an adventurer and business developer who had fought to defend Ukraine's sovereignty since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimea region.