A FAMILY UNDER FIRE
Gran died in hail of bullets as boys screamed in car behind
THE family helped into Poland by Dr Allin-Khan came under rocket attack after making the agonising decision to flee, leaving two dads and a teenage son to fight for Kyiv.
Vasily and Nina Shiripa were with their daughters and two young grandsons, in two cars flying white flags and painted with the word “civilians”.
Just 15 minutes outside the city they moved out of the way of a Russian armoured car. As it passed, it opened fire on the family – launching a rocket and unleashing a hail of bullets.
The two cars were torn to shreds. Grandmother Nina, in the first vehicle with Vasily, 64, was hit in the liver multiple times. In the car behind were their daughters Tallina Soboleva, 39, with son Yelisey, 10, and Illina Prusakova, 34, and her son Timofei, 12.
All four also suffered multiple bullet and shrapnel injuries.
As the attackers drove off, the family pulled Nina, 61, from the wreckage, blood seeping from her wounds, and took her to a nearby village. Doctor Rosena said: “If you can imagine this, the mother is telling us this story in tears, saying that everyone was too afraid to open the doors.
“Just imagine, you’re a mum, your kids have been shot, your own mum’s
bleeding to death and you’re banging on doors, screaming, in a village where people are too afraid to open the door.”
When Nina died around 30 minutes later only Illina, the least injured, was in any condition to comfort her.
Tallina had told Rosena: “I didn’t get to see her because I’d lost a lot of blood. I couldn’t even say goodbye. My sister was with her but it was too difficult for my mum to speak, she had so much blood in her mouth.” An elderly woman eventually gave them shelter and did her best to patch up the boys.
It took the five survivors a week to reach the relative safety of Lviv. Told of their plight, Rosena and her team gave emergency aid and offered to take them to medics in Lublin, Poland.
Rosena revealed the boys had been shot through their arms and hands.
She said: “The bullets are still in their arms. Tallina had a very serious wound. The bullet fragments shattered her arm… many of those fragments will never come out.
“They were escaping as the bombing, air raids and sound of planes were having such a traumatic impact on the children.
“The thing that struck me was that every traumatic experience you can go through – being severely injured, having a child severely injured, having a husband and child fighting in a war, having your parent die… Every single experience that individually would floor any one of us, these people are going through this simultaneously. I was amazed they were able to function.”
She gave the boys a letter written for a Ukrainian child by her eight-year-old daughter, as well as football shirts from AFC Wimbledon and Tooting & Mitcham FC.
She said: “When we got to Poland we had to drop the mum off at one hospital and the two boys went to a specialist children’s hospital.
“We’d all created such a bond that every person on the coach, including the driver, walked them to the hospital – and then we all waited outside the door of the emergency department.”