‘I should have been with him’: Ukrainian mother describes the horror of losing her 10-year-old in a Russian airstrike
When wars kill many over years, the names of the dead can bleed into faceless lists.
But each loss still burns a black hole in the worlds they left behind. And few more so than Tymur Hryhorenko.
Most of the bald facts of his death are horrifyingly unremarkable, after three years of Russian bombardment. He was the only death from a huge 4:40 a.m. local time, Russian airstrike that hit a top floor apartment in the frontline town of Kramatorsk on July 22.
But Tymur, 10, one of the most recent children to die in Russia’s war on Ukraine, had lost his father to the war two years earlier, and had demanded to visit his grandmother in Kramatorsk. He was just nine hours away from catching the train, with his mother Nastya, to the relative safety of Kyiv.
Video posted by Donetsk emergency services shows Tymur’s limp, bloodied body, apparently still with a pulse, being resuscitated on the floor outside the ruined apartment. His mother had left him that night with his grandmother, but rushed back to the scene.
“Like a new breath of hope,” she said, “one of the soldiers came out and said that he had a pulse and they were resuscitating him. And for those 40 minutes, while they were pumping his chest, I prayed to God to give him life. But the miracle didn’t happen.”
Tymur Hryhorenko was killed when a July 22 airstrike on an apartment building in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. – CNN
Toys were left flipped onto the roof of the apartment building following the strike. – CNN
She said she was unable to go up to the apartment to see his body, and sensed the worst had happened when her sister rang an hour earlier. She hung up the call immediately, but quickly rang back. “She said, ‘They took Mom away, and they’re searching for Tymur under the rubble.’ From that moment on, I felt like I was in a dream.”
Nastya sits alone on a bench outside her sister’s apartment in Kramatorsk, swamped in loss. Tymur was her only child. And his father, Evhen, from whom she was separated, died in May 2023, fighting the Russians outside of Lyman. She shares video of Tymur and Evhen playing on a bed. Evhen throwing his son around, with the fatherly skill of appearing carefree, while being intensely careful. Nearly a year ago, she says, she remarried, but her second husband died from a heart attack six months later.
She blames herself for not being in her mother’s spare room alongside her son Tymur when the bomb struck. “At that very moment, I wasn’t at home, unfortunately,” she wept. “I don’t know why or how, what forces took me away from it. But I should have been with him. And I blame myself very much for that.”
Tymur had insisted they go and see his grandmother. But Nastya was insistent they leave the next day, on the train to Kyiv. “He said he wanted to stay. I said, ‘No, son, we’re going, we’re definitely going.’”
Tymur Hryhorenko’s mother Nastya was not in the apartment when the airstrike hit. – CNN
The scene of his death is typical for an eastern town, where Ukrainian troops live among the locals, and Russian bombs refuse to discriminate, and torment every night. An elderly woman, tending her plants in the courtyard, mutters how troops in the town make them a target. Another neighbor clears broken glass from the stairwell still stained by Tymur’s blood. On the roof, children’s plastic toys are trapped beneath upturned roofing felt. Three generations of Nastya’s family have lived in her mother’s apartment, and the children’s toys were stacked up in plastic bags for when grandchildren visit.
She remembers their last moment together, the evening before he died. “We went crazy, I showed him how I used to give him massages when he was a child, we laughed … and that was it.”
She shows videos of a growing boy, enjoying a McDonalds milkshake, in a “Friends” hoodie. Of birthdays, and of Tymur reading a poem about the value of family. It is his little virtues, even at that age, that Nastya clings to most dearly.
Tymur Hryhorenko’s grave in Kramatorsk. – CNN
“He loved all animals and children,” she said. “At home in Kyiv, he has two pet rats waiting for him. He loved them madly. He constantly called me and asked, ‘Mom, did you clean their cage? Did you feed them? Do they have water?’”
His teacher praised him for standing up when girls in his class were picked on. “He is very caring,” she said, her voice breaking to tears. “A very bright boy, very much so.”
UNICEF reported in June that over 2,700 children had been killed or injured by the war in Ukraine.
Tymur sits on the outskirts of town, on a hill in a fresh grave, the chalk stone he lies under covered in flowers. The graveyard has new holes, freshly dug, accepting the town’s loss is far from over. The skyline occasionally rattles with blasts, and the birds scatter, disturbed by air raid sirens.
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