Fears rise for a rights activist captured while fighting for Ukraine.
The man they know, they say, is the opposite of the one portrayed on Russian television.

“He never accepted either the extreme-right views or the extreme left,” said his mother, Yevheniia Butkevych. “He took shape as a person who is absolutely alien to extreme positions, which, as a rule, are aggressive.”

In fact, Ms. Butkevych said, her son was a pacifist who had maintained after Russian proxies invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014 that the best use of his talents was as an activist. But that changed on Feb. 24, when Russian missiles crashed into his hometown, Kyiv, and cities and towns across the country.

The same day, Mr. Butkevych, 45, reported to a military recruitment center.

“He said, ‘I will leave my human rights work for a while, because now it is necessary, first of all, to protect the country,” Ms. Butkevych recalled. “Because everything I have worked on all these years and everything that we all worked for, the rules of our lives and of our society are now under threat.’”

Mr. Butkevych, her only child, was called up on March 4 and became a platoon commander around Kyiv, before being sent in mid-June to try to reinforce the army as it fought to keep Sievierodonetsk.