Alone in the Ambulance
– Orphans –
Twenty people were killed and more than 100 wounded as a result of Russian missile strikes on numerous Ukrainian cities on October 10th. The occupiers launched 84 cruise missiles, as well as 24 drones.
In Sloviansk, in the Donetsk region, 26-year-old Kateryna Kodyntseva was killed along with her partner and his mother. A missile directly hit their house. The only family member who miraculously survived was her 12-year-old brother, Ruslan. The boy was thrown out of the house by the blast; he was injured and taken to a hospital. When asked by the psychologist if he understood what had happened, Ruslan answered: “If they had survived, we would have been in the ambulance together. But I was there alone.”
Kateryna was a talented violinist. Two months prior to her death, a journalist published a video on a social network of a young woman playing in the street and wrote, “In the most difficult times, music gives strength to move on. Impressive violin playing by Kateryna in the frontline city.”
Kateryna has been taking care of Ruslan since their parents died – at the time he was 5 and she was 19. Now he has no one left in his life.
(The mayor of Sloviansk said that three families expressed a desire to adopt the boy.)
In Kyiv, on the morning of October 10, Oksana Leontyeva first went to drop off her 5-yer-old son Grisha at kindergarten and then rushed to her work. She was a pediatric hematologist and for the last 11 years has treated children with cancer at a department of bone marrow transplantation. A Russian missile hit her car while she was driving through the center of Kyiv. The car burned to the ground.
Grisha’s father had died a year earlier. Losing the father was traumatic for the child, and a psychologist has been working with him.
Now the little boy is an orphan.
(Luckily, he has grandparents and an uncle)
Photos are of Ruslan’s sister, the talented local violinist Kateryna Kodyntseva, killed when the missile directly hit their home.
10/12/2022. Translated and abridged by Elena Lozovsky
10/11/2022. Translated and abridged by Marianna Epstein
