“Just tell me,” she said.
The officer asked if they could go inside first.
“No,” Mary replied. “Just tell me.”
And so, she heard it standing at her own gate, in the open air, outside the house where her son had grown up.
Yes. He was dead.
Sam Haines was 22.
Family photographs show an ordinary Auckland boy: a former Westlake Boys High School student, cheerful, creative, with an eccentric sense of humour and a childhood love of Lego.
Nothing in those pictures hints at where his life would end.
Less than a year after leaving New Zealand with no military experience, Sam was killed fighting alongside Ukrainian Special Forces on the front line in eastern Ukraine.
Shot by a Russian soldier in the cellar of an abandoned house.
His death has never before been publicly reported.
He is the sixth New Zealander confirmed to have died in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Before leaving New Zealand in early 2025, the closest thing Sam had to military training was Airsoft in the Waitākere Ranges, where simulated combat attracts everyone from hobbyists to current and former soldiers.
“Sam was incredibly skilful,” Simon says.
“He had an instinct. He was tactical and extraordinarily calm under pressure.”
As a teenager, Sam became fascinated by the world of defence and private military contractors. He later enrolled in a Defence Studies degree at Massey University.
“When he left New Zealand, he told us he’d got an intelligence job in Poland through people he’d met at Airsoft, ” says Simon.
His parents believed him.
But he never went to Poland.
Instead, he crossed into Ukraine and enlisted.
“If he’d told us before he left that he was going to Ukraine, we would have thrown up a storm,” Mary says.
“No military experience. No combat experience. But the doors just kept opening for him and he just kept progressing.”
Within months, Sam had joined the Azov Brigade’s International Battalion.
Azov began in 2014 as a volunteer militia fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, attracting controversy because of its early far-right associations.
Over time, and after the brutal Russian siege of Mariupol in 2022, the unit was absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard and transformed into a more formal military force.
The Azov website recruitment pitch presents itself not simply as a military unit, but as a cause, a brotherhood in “the world’s most intense conflict”.
Sam was selected for its Special Forces Assault Unit, serving alongside former American, British and European soldiers.
One of them was an American from Tennessee who went by the call sign Cheese.
“Sam was my best friend here,” Cheese says during an encrypted WhatsApp call from somewhere in the Donbas.
“I treated him like my little brother.”
Behind him, hanging on the wall of what was once a garden tool shed, is a machine gun. He cleaned out the abandoned building himself and turned it into his room.
“When I first moved in it was freezing,” he says. “Now that it’s warming up, it’s become a nice cosy little shack.”
The two men trained together for four months before joining Alpha Two, an assault unit responsible for clearing Russian trenches, bunkers and fortified positions.
The war in eastern Ukraine is frequently compared to the trench warfare of World War I – a grinding, brutal and bloody struggle for slivers of territory measured in metres and paid for in lives.
Sam and Cheese were at the sharp end.
“The war here is mostly a shrapnel war,” Cheese says.
“You’re throwing grenades into holes the size of a small room and shooting around corners.”
During their first operation together, Sam saved his life.
The pair was running through a tree line under the gaze of a Russian drone.
A moment after Cheese ran through, Sam stopped him.
“There’s a mine right next to you.”
Hours later, sheltering in a trench under artillery fire, another drone descended on their position. Sam grabbed Cheese and dragged him into cover.
“It was our introduction to Ukraine,” Cheese says.
The two men would fight on about a dozen operations.
“Sam was one of the best,” Cheese says.
“He could do everything. Very calm and resilient. If I went to do something impulsive, he’d stop me and say there was a better way.”
Their commander, known by the call sign Uno, remembers an ambush in which Alpha Two was pinned down by Russian troops.
“Cheese and Sam ran forward and opened fire,” he says.
“Sam emptied a thousand rounds into the tree line until the Russians pulled back.
“They saved everybody’s lives.”
Azov understands the value of imagery.
Soldiers wear body cameras, and footage is routinely uploaded online.
The videos resemble a first-person shooter game: a rubble-strewn hellscape, sudden bursts of gunfire, a soundtrack layered with heavy metal.
Mary and Simon have watched some of that footage since Sam died. In several of the videos, the figure moving through a warzone is their son.
“We saw him literally fighting in a trench,” says Simon.
“There was a Russian trying to shoot at him just on the other side of a trench bunker.”
Mary says she found it “terrifying”.
“I kept thinking, how can he be doing this? He seemed as calm as anything under fire.”
Mary and Simon spoke to their son every couple of weeks.
“He never told us where he was,” Mary says.
“We thought he was in Poland. We thought he was making $80,000 working for an intelligence agency.”
The truth was very different.
Sam was living in eastern Ukraine, earning US$500 ($880) a month and fighting on one of the most dangerous front lines in the world.
Cheese understood why Sam had kept the secret.
“I’d done the same thing with my dad,” he says.
“Your mind’s made up. You don’t want the people you love trying to talk you out of it.”
In August, Sam called home. He told his parents he was thinking about returning to New Zealand for a short break.
As the conversation ended, he paused.
“And then he said, ‘Okay, do you want me to tell you what it is I’ve been doing?’,” Mary recalls.
“Buckle up,” Sam told his parents.
“I’m in Ukraine. I’m fighting with the Special Forces,” he said.
“You know I’ve always wanted to be a soldier.”
For months, they had imagined one version of their son’s life. Now they were hearing another.
Mary kept asking him the same question.
“Why?”
“He just said ‘it’s the right thing to do’,” she says. “And he also said, this is something he could do.”
Sam told them he had been serving on assault teams. The experience, he told them, had shaken him.
He was planning to step back from frontline operations and move into an instructor or radio communications role.
“I never really believed he would step back,” Mary says.
“He found his tribe. They loved him. They cared for him. I think he felt understood there.”
Cheese got it.
“There’s a lot of guys who come to Ukraine to get into the private military industry,” says Cheese.
“But then there’s a switch where the amount of purpose, brotherhood and sacrifice is so powerful you end up being here just for that.”
Before his final deployment, Sam called home again.
“He said, ‘Oh no, it’s safe, Mum. It’s safe, there’ll be no drones. We’ll have plenty of support’,” Mary recalls.
“He always said to me; ‘We’re the good guys, Mum’.”
Simon asked him to come home.
“He said; ‘Look, if I pull out at this point, the rest of my team’s lives will be in danger’. I didn’t like it, but I had to accept it.”
Alpha Two had been sent to clear Russian forces from the village of Zolotyi Kolodiaz, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas.
Progress came slowly, one street, one house at a time.
By then, casualties had reshaped the unit. Cheese had become team leader. Sam, just 22, was voted in as his second-in-command.
On the seventh day, a Russian glide bomb forced the men to look for cover. They found an abandoned house and headed for the cellar.
Cheese told Sam to take point.
The staircase was narrow.
The cellar below was dark.
Inside were three Russian soldiers.
“As soon as they got into the basement, there was gunfire,” Cheese says.
Sam and the soldier behind him were killed almost instantly. A third man crawled back up the stairs, badly wounded.
That left Cheese and a machine gunner outside the cellar entrance.
“I’m shooting down, and I start getting engaged by the three Russians in the basement,” he says. “They’re shooting back up and out.”
The Russians ignored repeated calls to surrender.
“We threw fragmentation grenades. We threw smoke,” Cheese says.
“They didn’t come out.”
Among Azov fighters, there is an unwritten rule: the dead are not left behind.
But Sam and the other fallen soldier were carrying equipment that could not be allowed to fall into Russian hands.
Azov command gave Cheese an order. If they couldn’t recover the bodies, they would have to destroy the position.
“I grabbed a tank mine, ran back around the position, and threw it into the cellar and levelled it,” he says.
For Cheese, yes, it was a hard thing for him to do.
“Yes,” he says. “I mean, you’re throwing a mine into where your best friend is.”
He pauses.
“But given the equipment that we had and the threat level, there was no other option.”
The blast left a crater about three metres deep.
It took the men four hours to recover the bodies.
In Kyiv, winter had arrived.
On a snowy day in Independence Square, Sam Haines was given a military funeral.
His coffin was draped with a New Zealand flag, surrounded by the men he had fought beside.
It would be another seven weeks before he came home.
By then it was January, the summer sun high over the North Shore as his family and friends laid him to rest.
“It’s been a brutal lesson in what actually matters in life,” Simon says.
“Most of the things I thought mattered actually don’t. I would just give anything to reverse that clock and take him back.”
Until now, the family have chosen to grieve in private.
Because Sam entered Ukraine on a British passport, there was no formal notification in New Zealand and few people beyond those closest to him knew what had happened.
“We’ve been at pains to keep it out of any public attention,” Simon says.
“We wanted to deal with it among family and friends before we went public.”
Mary says: “He went from a young guy to a man over there. We never got to know that man”.
In May, Simon, Mary and their daughter Holly travelled to Ukraine.
“We don’t understand war,” she says.
“We need to get some sense of that to see, what it was like for him. Because no matter how hard I try, I can’t understand why he had to die.”
On their third night in Kyiv, they got their answer – or at least a glimpse of it.
At 2am, Russia launched one of its largest aerial assaults of the year.
Drones and missiles poured into the city. A missile struck a nearby apartment building, killing a 12-year-old boy.
One of the drones skimmed over the skylight above the apartment where the family were staying.
“The way the drones moved, almost like insects, weaving around the buildings, just felt completely sinister,” Simon says.
“I was very scared. And that’s not the front line. That’s nothing compared to what the soldiers are facing.”
The family were presented with the medals Sam had been awarded for bravery, including one signed by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
They visited and tidied his memorial in Kyiv’s Independence Square, where tens of thousands of flags now flutter in honour of the soldiers killed in this war.
“To think that each one of those has a family like ours behind it – it’s almost too big to comprehend,” Simon says.
But it was meeting the men of Alpha Two that mattered most.
They had travelled from different parts of Ukraine to meet the parents of the young New Zealander they had fought beside.
“The lengths people went to, to meet these parents they’d never met before, showed the respect and the bond between those guys,” Simon says. “They clearly loved each other.”
For Mary, those conversations filled in parts of the story she could never have known.
“They said he was an amazing soldier and a great leader as well,” she says.
“For a 22-year-old, we thought, ‘Oh my gosh’.”
Before Simon and Mary left Ukraine, Cheese made the seven-hour journey from the front line to see them.
He brought one last gift.
Sam’s helmet.
“It was the last thing we have that he was wearing when he died,” Simon says.
“I feel bad for their loss,” Cheese says.
“He was like a little brother to me. I feel like I should have protected him. But he was a grown man. He made his choice. We were in it together.”
After Sam’s death, Cheese left the front line and asked to become an instructor.
Even now, he says, the events of that day remain close.
“Sometimes I’m still there,” he says. “I think about it every day. There were moments when I wondered whether I should even still be here.”
For a while, he considered leaving the war altogether.
Instead, he returned.
“I thought it would dishonour him,” he says.
“Everything he put into it. Everything he gave.”
When Mary heard that, she told him something she hopes he believes.
“I said to him, ‘The one thing Sam would want is for you to stay alive’.
“People always blame themselves when someone dies. They think they could have done something different. But I don’t know why Sam died. I never will.”
Ukraine answered some of the questions Simon and Mary had carried for months.
It helped them understand the soldier their son had become.
It could not change what had happened.
“I realised that he really was dead,” says Simon.
“My place is here as a witness in New Zealand and if he is somewhere, it’s more in the home and the places where he grew up.”
