UKRAINE, KHARKIV, Aug 21 — On August 18, Russian troops hit a residential building in Kharkiv with drones — the attack killed a family of five and another two people and injured 24.
Today’s morning, the family — 1.5-year-old Mia, her 16-year-old brother Artem, their 38-year-old mother Tetiana, 45-year-old father Ruslan, and 57-year-old grandmother Halyna — was buried in Kharkiv.
Relatives, neighbors, and colleagues came to say goodbye.
“It’s my first funeral,” says Olena Serha, Ruslan’s sister-in-law. “The sound of shovels hitting the ground is so… It’s impossible to describe. And I still don’t believe it. Even now, after I kissed Ruslan’s forehead, I still don’t believe he’s dead. He’s always been so alive. Laughed always.”
Olena lives with her family in Dnipro. For a long time, she told Gwara’s journalists, they hoped it was not their loved ones — even though Olena’s cousin recognized that Russia hit Ruslan and Tania’s building.
“We’ve read the news, and every second, we’ve been looking at who is being pulled from under the rubble. We had hope. Because, for some time, (authorities) were writing that a little boy (was killed), not a girl,” she says.
Olena called the Kharkiv police. Authorities connected her to the group that conducted a search operation in the Industrialnyi district.
“And they said, ‘We’re pulling out bodies but can’t say who those people are.’ But we already felt that that’s all ours. The description of the bodies matched. They were carried out one by one.”
Yurii Samoilyk, the head of the Mykolaivka village in Chernihiv Oblast, told Suspilne about Ruslan, who was born in this village.
“Ruslan lived in Kharkiv his entire adult life. There, he first got married and had a daughter. He also met his second wife in Kharkiv. At that time, she had a son, and later they had a daughter together,” said Samoilyk.
Olena tells Gwara she didn’t have a chance to meet Ruslan’s second family personally.
“They had to visit us soon. We didn’t get to meet them. We hadn’t even gotten to see Miia (a 1.5 girl who got killed in a Russian attack — ed.). Because we were in Dnipro. Because it’s very difficult to move across the country now,” she said.
“The day before (the attack), Ruslan called me and said he would help repair our bathroom. And the next day they killed him,” said Oksana, Ruslan’s cousin.
She mentioned that Ruslan was the godfather of his other cousin, who is almost the same age as Miia. Oksana saw Miia only once, when Ruslan and his family came to visit them.
“Ruslan was so cool, he was kind and helpful, always,” Olena recalls. “We laughed together a lot, he always called me his ‘favourite relative.”
Olena talks about Polinka — Ruslan’s daughter from the first marriage. “It’s a miracle she survived. She lived with them, but that night, she stayed at her mama’s flat. She sat on the 10th floor and just listened to all these explosions, and watched all these news.”
Children, Olena says, were most important to Ruslan. He only talked about his daughters.
Ruslan served in the 80th Air Assault Brigade from 2022 until 2023, when he was demobilized due to health reasons.
The servicemen of Ruslan’s assault brigade couldn’t come to say goodbye to their brother in arms. On August 20, they launched an artillery attack on the Russian position in Ruslan’s honor.
“I didn’t save him. He didn’t die in the war, but here,” said Lidiia, Ruslan’s aunt. She said that he was like a sun to her. Ruslan had no parents, so he always came to his aunt’s home.
“My heart hurts. I won’t forgive those people who launched all this (Russian attack drones). There is no forgiveness, only emptiness and hate toward them,” said Lidiia.
“There are many families like this one in Ukraine. And the enemy kills us every day. Their names are being erased, one on top of the other, — and those who were killed earlier, no one remembers them,” Olena says.
“I hope this nightmare will end soon. I didn’t curse Russians before, but right now I want the soil they want so much to fall on their bodies, like it does on ours (in the graves).”
Read more
- Russian troops kill Olha “Lialia” Serdiuk, mortar operator from Kharkiv
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