KHARKIV, Ukraine — The mom and grandmother of a 15-year-old Ukrainian boy couldn’t maintain again their tears. Their anguish crammed the cramped hallway as they knelt over the teenager’s physique.
Artem Shevchenko was killed by shelling in Kharkiv, {a partially} blockaded northeastern metropolis the place Russian shelling has elevated in current days. Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis, Kharkiv is barely 25 miles from the Russian border.
Nine civilians died and greater than 50 individuals have been wounded Friday within the assault on one among Kharkiv’s residential areas, the Ukrainian president’s workplace reported.
“Please open your eyes, my bunny. Please,” Nina Shevchenko pleaded, captured in a transferring Associated Press video by which she mourns her son.
The boy’s grandmother arrived as individuals got here to take his physique away.
“Let me see him! My baby. My golden sunshine!” the grandmother cried. “My dear sunshine. We just spoke today. My dear, why should I live, if you are gone? I lived for you. My sunshine. Curse them all! They should not find any place, neither on Earth, nor in heaven.”
“I lived for you,” Nina Shevchenko advised her son.
“Please open your eyes,” she mentioned, touching his face earlier than paramedics and neighbors took the boy away in a physique bag. A seven-month-old child was additionally killed within the shelling.
In one other constructing’s hallway, a younger woman broke down in tears as she recounted the horror of the assault and the way she was saved solely when “some woman, God bless her, covered me with her body.”
Outside, bloodied individuals lay in ache on the streets, the place ambulances arrived to deal with them.
Amid burned-out automobiles and particles, a person who had helped his good friend into an ambulance spoke out in opposition to Russian forces, whose invasion sparked a warfare in his nation.
“What did this guy do to them (Russians)?” requested Sergey Kirichenko, a good friend of the wounded man.
“With whom should we make peace?” Kirichenko requested. “With these monsters?”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”