Filmmaker and screenwriter Andriy Maksymenko died in the hospital after being wounded in action, Hromadske reported, citing his long-term partner, actress Anastasia Basha.

In 2014, Maksymenko volunteered to join the Dnipro Battalion. After the start of the full-scale invasion, he became a fighter of the Dzhokhar Dudayev volunteer battalion. He had the callsign Director.

"It is a great honor for a soldier to die in battle. Andriychyk, I am greatly honored to accept this with honor and dignity. I choose to take it on a high note," Anastasia Basha wrote.

She added that they lived together for seven and a half years. They had two children – Fedir and Zhiva.

Earlier, she wrote that on April 20, her husband had received a shrapnel wound in the left side of his head during a combat mission. On the same day, he first underwent a surgery in Dnipro, and was then transported to Kyiv.

Since then, the soldier was in an artificial coma, "on the brink of life and death," but the doctors believed that he had a chance to survive, Anastasia said.

As a screenwriter, Maksymenko worked on the movies The Seventh Route (1997), Old Colonels (2007) and the series Weekend Romance (2008). He was a director in the series Barbie's Wedding (2008). He also played in the movies Judenkreis, or the Eternal Wheel (1996), The Little Mermaid (1996), and Axe (1995) as an actor.