Haunting last photo of shell victim, 6
IT SHOULD have been a precious family photograph – six-yearold Oleg Kornievski posing for his mother with a bouquet of freshly picked flowers.
But the picture serves as a tragic prelude to yet another heartbreaking story from the war in Ukraine.
For just hours later Oleg was killed in a Russian artillery attack. He was mortally wounded by shrapnel in front of his house and his mother Ekaterina buried him the next day.
The distraught mother was seen cradling the mound of earth on his grave and weeping as she knelt on the ground to pray.
Little Oleg was one of three people killed when Russian forces shelled Lysychansk, a city in the east of Ukraine – just across the river from the battleground of Severodonetsk. At least one other person was wounded.
Serhiy Haidai, the head of Luhansk region, said the attacks on the area this week had also caused a shopping centre to burn down.
He said a separate air strike had hit a sanatorium building in the city – causing it to collapse and possibly leading to further casualties.
‘It is likely that there are people trapped under the rubble,’ he said of the second strike, with a rescue operation under way.
In the suburb of Vrubivka, 11 houses were destroyed, and in Hirske a nursery school was struck. Some 277 children have been killed and 456 injured over the course of the war, according to UN figures, though Ukraine puts the death toll at 313.