Roman Maksymyuk

On 30 January 2025 Maksymyuk, then a 50-year-old gunner in the 25th Sicheslav Airborne Brigade, called his wife Vira and told her he was going to positions on the Pokrovsk front in Donetsk Oblast and might be out of contact for a long time. Until then they had spoken almost every day. Contact was lost. On 10 March 2025 the unit told Vira he was still carrying out his duties, but on 13 March she was asked to report to the territorial recruitment centre and file a missing person report, and their daughter Daria gave a DNA sample. Reports said his unit had been trying to break out of a Russian encirclement, and he was listed as missing under special circumstances.

On 16 October 2026, after about 20 months, Vira announced on Facebook that DNA analysis had confirmed he had been killed while carrying out a combat mission on the Pokrovsk direction. The exact date of his death has not been made public; Ukrainian Wikipedia gives it as not earlier than 30 January 2025. Dynamo Kyiv published a statement of condolence the same evening. Funeral and burial details had not been made public at the time of writing.

Roman Vasylyovych Maksymyuk was born on 14 June 1974 in Bytkiv, a village in the Nadvirna district of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in western Ukraine, then part of the Ukrainian SSR. He began playing football in the fourth grade at the children's and youth sports school (DYuSSh) in Nadvirna, the district centre about 15 kilometres from home. With only three buses a day, he sometimes walked the distance to training. Champion noted that, like Ivan Yaremchuk, he did not come through a big club's academy but fought his way to the elite through regional teams.

Details of his schooling beyond the Nadvirna youth sports school have not been made public. After retiring as a player he obtained a coaching licence and began coaching under Vitaliy Kvartsyanyi at Volyn Lutsk, working as an assistant and acting head coach of the club's under-19 team.

Maksymyuk made his senior debut at 17 for Prykarpattya Ivano-Frankivsk in 1991, in the last Soviet championship (Second League B). Unable to break into the first team, he played for Krystal Chortkiv, CSKA Kyiv (CSK ZSU) and Beskyd Nadvirna, with short spells at CSKA-Borysfen, Khutrovyk Tysmenytsia and FC Tysmenytsia. He returned to Prykarpattya and made his Ukrainian top-flight debut on 25 July 1995 against Tavriya (4-3), playing two and a half seasons for the club.

In the winter of 1998 he joined Zenit Saint Petersburg under Anatoliy Byshovets, recommended by assistant Leonid Koltun and chosen from 21 trialists to fill the left side of midfield. He scored eight league goals in 1998 as Zenit led the Russian table in the first half of the season. On 26 May 1999 he scored the third goal in the 66th minute of the Russian Cup final at Luzhniki, a 3-1 win over Dynamo Moscow that made Zenit the first non-Moscow winner of the competition.

He joined Dynamo Kyiv from 1 January 2000 after a contested transfer. Under Valeriy Lobanovskyi he played seven league games and mostly appeared for Dynamo-2, but won the 1999-2000 Ukrainian Premier League and Ukrainian Cup. In 2001 he joined Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, owned by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, scoring 11 goals in 85 league games and winning league bronze in 2001 and 2004. From 2005 to 2008 he played for Volyn Lutsk, then for FC Atyrau (2008) and Kazakhmys (2009) in Kazakhstan, Chornomorets Odesa (2010) and Volyn again (2010-2011). He announced his retirement on 12 December 2011 after a final league match for Volyn against Illichivets Mariupol.

For Ukraine he won five caps between 1998 and 2002, debuting on 19 August 1998 against Georgia (4-0).

After retiring Maksymyuk coached Volyn's under-19 side and in the summer of 2015 joined the staff of Oleh Lutkov at Veres Rivne, leaving that October for health reasons. On 12 January 2017 he was appointed head coach of FC Ternopil. Within hours, television presenter Ihor Tsyhanyk published testimony by former Metalist youth player Yevhen Malyk naming him as an organiser of fixed matches in the youth championship, and Ternopil terminated his contract on 18 January, officially citing differences over training. Maksymyuk denied any involvement. He said he gave evidence to the Prosecutor General's Office, that investigators found no evidence against him, and that the scandal nevertheless ended his coaching career. No charges against him were reported.

Maksymyuk spoke candidly, notably in a December 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Bombardir, about a gambling addiction he called an illness. He said he once lost everything he had in three months at Dnipro, about 300,000 dollars including an Audi A8 he pawned, and Champion reported total losses of more than 700,000 dollars. He saw a psychologist, Dnipro put limits on his bank card, and he chose Volyn Lutsk over Metalist Kharkiv partly because Lutsk had no casino. He urged young players never to set foot in one.

His first marriage, to Tetiana, ended in a public break-up; she later married Dynamo and Ukraine player Oleksandr Aliiev. Their son Vitaliy lived with his mother in Kyiv, and Maksymyuk said that years later his son contacted him and they rebuilt their relationship. In Lutsk he married his second wife, Vira, and they raised a son, Ihor, and a daughter, Daria. After his coaching career collapsed he worked as a loader in a Lutsk supermarket.

From the first days of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Maksymyuk collected aid for the Ukrainian army and played in charity veterans' football tournaments that raised money for vehicles for front-line units. In the autumn of 2022 he volunteered for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He served first in a mobile fire group whose task was to destroy enemy aerial targets, initially in Lutsk and then on the Kharkiv front, and later as a gunner in the 25th Separate Sicheslav Airborne Brigade, fighting on the Kharkiv and Pokrovsk directions. Fellow soldiers said he fought like a lion, and he received awards for courage. In a 2024 interview he said his two dreams were to help Ukraine win the war and to return to football as a coach.

Maksymyuk said the full-scale invasion radically changed his outlook. As late as 2021 he described his time at Zenit as a highlight of his career, but by 2024 he said he wanted nothing to do with Russians and did not want his children and grandchildren to either, and that the message that Russia was a threat to Ukraine's existence had to be passed from generation to generation. He believed in Ukraine's victory because, he said, there was no other choice: if Ukraine lost, it would cease to exist as a state. He also warned young footballers about the dangers of gambling.

Maksymyuk is remembered as a self-made footballer from a village in the Carpathian foothills who reached the Ukraine national team, scored in a cup final and won a domestic double with Dynamo Kyiv, and as one of the Ukrainian sportspeople who left civilian life to defend the country. On 7 June 2025, while he was still missing, the Ukraine national team made his Volyn shirt and military jacket part of its team photo before a friendly against Canada in Toronto, a gesture the Ukrainian Association of Football said was meant to support his family and show the world that the war concerns everyone. His death was mourned by Dynamo Kyiv, which called him a hero, and widely reported by Ukrainian and international media, including BBC News Ukrainian, Suspilne, El Mundo and Euromaidan Press. He is listed among Ukrainian sports figures killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Russian Cup winner with Zenit Saint Petersburg (1999), scoring in the final. Ukrainian Premier League champion and Ukrainian Cup winner with Dynamo Kyiv (1999-2000). Ukrainian Premier League bronze medallist with Dnipro (2001 and 2004). Five caps for the Ukraine national team (1998 to 2002). Military awards for courage during his service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (the specific decorations were not detailed in reports).

Maksymyuk's most widely watched interview was a long conversation with journalist Roman Bebekh's YouTube channel Bombardir, published in December 2021, in which he discussed his transfer from Zenit to Dynamo, his gambling addiction, the match-fixing allegations and his work as a loader. He also spoke to FanDay in 2021 about the Zenit-Dynamo transfer, and to Champion in 2024 about his military service. Bombardir's Telegram channel reported the DNA confirmation of his death in October 2026.