"Hello, my dear, beloved Natasha," wrote Zhenya Mamykin to his fiancee in late December last year. "I'm sending you big greetings, as it turns out I will be celebrating the 1995 New Year in unexpected circumstances. I have been in the mountains 12 kilometers from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, for three weeks already..."

When Natasha Kislova read these words in early January of the new year, she was not alarmed. Even though the letter from Zhenya went on to describe fierce night battles, guerrilla attacks, and the injuries and death of some of his fellow Russians, Natasha never considered that anything serious could happen to him, even in war.

"He was the kind of person who could get out of any situation," she says, reminiscing in the park where they used to walk together. "The kind of person where things always turned out right in the end. I was just sure that of anybody sent there, he would come back alive."

As Natasha later found out, the young man she loved and planned to marry was dead even before she received his letter. Nineteen-year-old Zhenya Mamykin was killed on New Year's Day 1995, fighting a battle on the soil of his native land, in a war that has bitterly divided the Russian people and left countless families grieving.

"For this stupidity my son died," says Zhenya's mother, Natalya Dmitrievna, of the Chechnya conflict. "It's all the worse that his death was for nothing at all. For nothing!"

As Natasha sees it, "does it really matter where he died? Or what he was fighting for? The only thing that matters is that he's gone. The only thing that matters is that we have lost him."