Yuriy Rockbell

Yuriy is defined by his compassion and his refusal to take sides when lives hang in the balance. Working the Ishval front with his wife Sarah, the couple earned a reputation across the Kanda region for mending the injured of both armies, and figures such as Doctors Marcoh and Knox looked on them as a medical inspiration. Countless Ishvalans owed their survival to the pair, yet the very even-handed mercy that made them heroes to the wounded marked them as a liability in the eyes of Amestrian command.

He grew up, lived, and practiced in Resembool as a surgeon before he and Sarah left home to treat casualties on the front lines. As the military came to view their humanitarian work as a nuisance, moves were made to have them killed. In the manga and 2009 anime, Solf J. Kimblee is quietly ordered to murder the couple and stage it as an accident, but before the Crimson Alchemist can arrive, Scar kills them himself, having just woken in their makeshift clinic and been driven into a rage on learning of his brother's death. The 2003 anime tells it another way: Basque Grand brands the Rockbells insurgents for patching up Ishvalans who then rejoined the fight, and Roy Mustang, acting against his own will, is forced to carry out the execution and shoots them both. Their daughter Winry learns of their fate from two Ishvalan children, Rick and Leo, whose mother had once been given medicine at the clinic.

Trained as a surgeon, Yuriy also worked as a weapon smith and automail technician within the family's Rockbell Automail practice, pairing broad medical knowledge with a steady, giving nature. An omake even paints him and Sarah as every bit the automail enthusiasts their daughter would grow up to be. Because Yuriy is a Russian name, some have speculated that he carried full or partial Drachman ancestry, Drachma being the setting's stand-in for real-world Russia.