Kyiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – As concrete dust was settling around the remains of her home, pulverised by a Russian missile in Kyiv last week, Tetiana Yakovlieva understood her missing children could only be in one of two places.
Issued on: 19/05/2026 - 15:12Modified: 19/05/2026 - 15:13
3 min Reading time
Either her 12- and 17-year-old were trapped alive beneath the mound of rubble that was once their nine-storey housing bloc in the leafy neighbourhood of the Ukrainian capital.Or her daughters were dead, and already with their father, who volunteered to fight when Russian forces invaded Ukraine and was killed in combat three years earlier."It's so painful -- these words won't mean anything to you until you feel it yourself," she told a local television crew in shock at the strike site during the hours-long rescue operation and painful wait for answers.Five days later, on Tuesday, Yakovlieva hunched ashen-faced and gently rocking back and forth before her daughters' closed coffins under the golden domes of Saint Michael's church in Kyiv, as an Orthodox priest intoned their funeral mass.'Pain of loss'"No words of compassion can ease this pain of loss, this burden of great suffering, when one must bury young people," the priest told black-clothed mourners, weeping or clutching flowers and holding each other."This is a tragedy not only for your family, it is a tragedy for our entire Ukrainian state today."
