‘Nadya is finally smiling again, but she does not know her father is dead’
T‘She looked very scared after two weeks of hiding from bombs... Her hair was in plaits as we didn’t have any water or place to wash’
he suntanned girl smiling in her grandmother’s arms is a world away from the pale, traumatised figure who escaped from an icy Mariupol this spring.
A haunting photograph published on The Daily Telegraph’s front page on March 18 showed her when she emerged from the southern Ukrainian city as it was under siege by invading Russian forces: a worried-looking child with piercing grey eyes gazing directly into the camera, her wan face framed by plaits of hair escaping from a grubby Disney hoodie.
The Telegraph has identified her as eight-year-old Nadya Konyakhina, now living as a refugee with her mother and grandmother in Spain, where a dark secret is hanging over the family.
Things are going “so so”, said Galyna Konyakhina, speaking through a translator via Skype, as her granddaughter squirmed in her arms in their apartment close to the beach in Almería, Andalusia, on Sunday.
But when Nadya is out of earshot, Galyna reveals that a tragedy has befallen the family. Nadya’s father – Oleksandr Konyakhin, Galyna’s eldest son – has been killed in fighting in the Donbas region and his body has not been recovered.
The family have not been able to bring themselves to inform Nadya of her father’s death. Galyna wanted to share her son’s story as a way of honouring his sacrifice, but struggled to speak about him in depth, or reveal when they might tell Nadya her father was gone forever.
It is the latest blow since they were taken away from Mariupol, where they spent two weeks sheltering in their basement listening to the war destroying their hometown.
Telegraph photographer Simon Townsley took a picture of Nadya and her mother Christina as their evacuation convoy arrived in Zaporizhzhia on March 17.
The journey out of the shattered city through Russian checkpoints had taken 26 hours and the family arrived exhausted. While Nadya sat silently drinking an apple juice, a tearful Christina was able to video call Oleksandr, who was then fighting on the front line, to let him know they had successfully escaped the siege.
Nadya, Christina and Galyna would soon leave the country but the men in the family remained behind, with both
Galyna’s sons Oleksandr and Roman fighting in the Ukrainian military.
“We didn’t have any choice,” said Galyna, of her decision to flee to Spain. “Our youngest son [Roman] told us to leave Ukraine because we didn’t know what would happen.”
After they arrived in Spain later in March, a friend who saw the photo of Nadya online shared it with the family and then contacted The Telegraph.
“Her face looked very scared after two weeks of hiding from bombs,” Galyna said of her reaction to seeing the photograph. “Her hair was in plaits because we didn’t have any water or place to wash.”
Readjusting to a peaceful life in a foreign country has been difficult. “At the beginning, it was just impossible,” said Galyna. “We had nightmares of Mariupol and bombs and planes.”
But Nadya is a resilient child who has bounced back, though they don’t talk much about Mariupol. “She’s met new people and it’s very easy for her,” said Galyna.
However, her voice breaks into sobs as she returns to the topic of her son’s death: “Now the main thing I want to do is to find the remains of my son.”
Oleksandr’s widow Christina has been too distraught to function properly and Galyna has only managed to keep going herself because her youngest son Roman is still fighting in a Ukrainian special forces unit.
Oleksandr had been a reluctantly absent father, Galyna said, away for long stretches at the front line. After Ukrainian troops defeated pro-russian separatist fighters in Mariupol in 2014, a billboard was erected in the city to celebrate their victory. On it, a photo showed Oleksandr in a blue striped vest astride an armoured vehicle between two rifle-toting comrades.
In his arm is a young Nadya, wearing his beret.
Nadya last saw her father on Sept 21 last year, Galyna said. He had been due home for leave in February but then the war started. “He always held her hand,” Galyna remembered. “He wasn’t home a lot of the time, but when he came home he was always with his daughter.”
In the year since she last saw her father Nadya has grown fast. Galyna says her resilience has buoyed the family through a dark period. “She’s an energiser bunny.”
Next month, Nadya will start school and has already learnt some words of Spanish. But Galyna dreams of returning to a free Mariupol, where she had a house with a pool that Nadya loved swimming in and a garden that Oleksander planted.
“That’s why I want to go back to Mariupol, because the garden is a memory of my son,” she said.