“Give me a pixel and a weapon”: friends remember Gleb Babich, who died in the war four years ago

Four years ago, near Izyum in the Kharkiv region, a soldier, poet, public activist, and leader of the veterans’ organization “Res_Publika. Brothers in Arms” Hleb Babich died. Friends and comrades share their memories of Hleb on this day.

“The earth must be kept alive.

There are already enough children and heroes here in paradise.

Well, I’ll go help.

Give me a pixel and a weapon…”, Petro Poroshenko quoted the lines of his deceased friend on social media.

“Four years since Russia killed our Gleb Babich… It seems like we should have gotten used to it a long time ago, but it turns out quite the opposite. Every year, you realize more and more acutely how much our “Lentiai” did not manage to do,” Poroshenko notes.

“Glib managed to do so much in a short time that sometimes it seemed that for him there was some other dimension of time, not ours. Six rotations at the front, and at the same time – poems were written, a book was published, a public organization was founded. And there were always comrades nearby, whom he dragged along even when he himself was exhausted. He did not divide his life into “military” and “civilian”. For him, it was one, because it was necessary to defend both the land and the meaning for which this land must be defended,” Poroshenko writes.

“Mykolaiv remembers him as its own. The brothers from the “Edelweiss” remember the commander who went into battle first. “Brothers in Arms” now bear his name as an obligation. And the streets that we fought for in Kyiv and Mykolaiv are our way of making sure that children who never knew him ask about him later,” the fifth President notes.

“The hardest thing is the moments when you realize that you will no longer hear him laughing at the entire House of Officers, or grumbling when something is not done the way he intended. That laughter and that grumbling are still somewhere a reference point when things are difficult. Four years without you, Hlib. We continue to carry the flag. Honor, brother!”, Poroshenko writes.

Until 2019, Gleb Babich was a platoon commander of the 10th OGShBr. After February 24, 2022, he became a fighter of the Kyiv Regional Defense Forces. He wrote over 500 songs and poems. Songs based on his poems are performed by the Kozak System group – “Give Us Arms”, “Power and Weapons”, “Enough Sad Songs”, “Freedom is Like Love”, “Molfar”, “Those Who Hold the Sky Over Christmas” and “Don’t Leave”.

Hlib Babich implemented many projects to help the army. The optical reconnaissance complexes he designed along the front line saved many lives of Ukrainian soldiers. The veteran organization “Res_Publika. Brothers in Arms” now bears his name, and its members have been fighting at the front since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

In October 2023, an initiative group of Kyiv residents proposed renaming Kanalna Street in honor of Hlib Babich. A vote was held in the “Kyiv Digital” application. In January 2024, the Kyiv City Council adopted a decision to rename the street in honor of the Hero and Poet. The former 8 Bereznya Street, located in the Zavodsky district of Hlib Babich’s hometown of Mykolaiv, was also renamed in his honor.

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