Their lives intersect near the playground on a sunny Friday night in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih.
16-year-old Kostiantyn Novik hangs out with his cousin with friends. Serhii Smotolok, 57, is caring for beer near the restaurant’s terrace and relaxing after working days. Radislav Yatsko, 7, was sitting in the back seat of her parents’ car, and they drove past the playground and returned home from an afternoon country cabin.
In one moment, the lively scene turned into a massacre: a Russian missile attacked near the playground, and the rainy shrapnel ripped apart everything on the road.
Kostiantyn and his cousin are killed immediately, and Kostiantyn’s legs are torn apart by explosions. Mr. Smotolok was hit by missile debris and bleed to death on the terrace. Radislav died, shrapnel blew up part of his skull.
“Everything is covered in blood,” said his father, Rodion Yatsko. He begged the doctor and saved his son’s life shortly afterwards. “Then one person came to our car and looked inside and said, ‘It’s over.'”
According to the United Nations, the attacks on Friday killed 19 civilians, including nine children, making it the deadliest strike against children since the start of a full-scale Russian invasion. The attack was the worst attack by Kryvyi Rih during the war, and a wave of shock was announced in Ukraine, which announced national mourning on Sunday. Western allies expressed their support, and on the same day, the embassy in Kiev lowered their flag to halfway.
For residents of Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the attack reminds people that, despite a ceasefire negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, the war is still ongoing three years later. Moscow continues to bombard missiles and drones to Ukrainian cities far from the front, despite taking risks to civilians.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that the strike killed 85 Ukrainian and Western officers and gathered in restaurants near the playground. But security footage reviewed by The New York Times shows the restaurant full of women attending events in the beauty industry, and employees cleaned up the room just minutes before the attack.
“They were just murdering children and civilians,” Radislav’s mother Anna Yatsko said Sunday on the eve of her son’s funeral. “There are no soldiers, only civilians.”
“All discussion about the ceasefire is empty talk,” she added.
Kryvyi Rih is an industrial city about 600,000 miles from the front line, with Russian drones and missiles hit regularly. Two days before Friday’s strike, a missile killed four residents.
In the midst of hardship, residents long for happy moments.
When 16-year-old Kostiantyn asked his aunt and legal guardian, Liubov Svoroba, whom hesitated for a while when he and his cousin could hang out with friends on the playground, she hesitated, but eventually agreed. Two teenagers love to escape the shadows of war there, often on basic, colorful sit-in benches and bra machines scattered on sandy terrain.
“They said they just wanted to go for a walk to meet their friends,” said Ms. Svoloba, 65. “Once they got there, there was an explosion.”
Olga Yaroshenko, 66, saw huge smoke and dust rising from the playground a few blocks from her apartment. Her first thought was her partner, Mr. Smotolok, who drank beer in the restaurant. They have been together for eight years and have found love in their future lives. They are saving money for a new car – Mr. Smotolok’s dream.
When Ms. Yaroshenko arrived at the strike site, she saw the body of a woman, a teenager and several children, some of which had been covered by medical staff. “The whole area looked like a body,” she recalled. “There was a cry, a scream – it was unbearable.”
In the chaos, she couldn’t find Mr. Smotolok and held on to his hopes. Then her phone rang and his number flashed on the screen. “I feel relieved – ‘He must be alive!’” she recalled.
She answered the phone and only heard a stranger’s voice: “This is the investigator’s speech. Sehi Hrichievich passed away today,” a police officer told her, a patriotic sect who used her partner.
The area around the playground still had the scars of the massacre on Sunday: blood on the sidewalk, a piece of human flesh on the dining chair. The nearby buildings shattered windows, and the deep crater created by the impact of the missile was a few yards from the playground.
It is not clear what type of weapon Russia fires in the park. The United Nations sent a team to inspect the area, and local authorities believe Russia used an Iskander ballistic missile that exploded several meters above the park and bathed the area with shrapnel.
Mr. Yatsko, the father of Radislav, said their family was so inseparable that he once thought that if it were a missile or a drone, they would all die together. At least, he said: “No one suffers from losing a loved one.
But on Friday, only Radislav was killed. His parents, his 8-month-old sister Adelina and his great-grandmother (when the missile hit, they were all in the car – survived concussions and scratches.
Ms. Yatsko gave birth to Radislav after struggling for years to become pregnant. When he arrived, she said, he “makes everything better.”
He loved animals and spent hours in his family’s cabin collecting cockroaches, lizards and butterflies when he did not rescue hedgehogs from the busy streets. A teacher at a school memorial on Monday said she had never heard a boy speak so tenderly to his sister. She said that when Ms. Yatsko was pregnant with Adelina, Radislav kissed her belly every night before going to bed.
Ms. Asco, wearing a black turban to represent her mourning, stared at her son’s face as he was taken to an open-air coffin and stared at her face as he was taken to a small wooden Orthodox Christian church. A gray hat covered his head injury. The red scar extending from the forehead to the bruised right eye is the only sign of the trauma.
“Not him! Not him!” Ms. Yatsko cried, then muttered Radislav’s name three times, as if trying to wake him up from a long sleep. Before burying him, his parents stuffed a stuffed animal between his arms.
A few days after the attack, a temporary memorial emerged across the park, filled with toys for children’s deaths, candy bars, roses and candles, covering benches, swings and Tate totter feet. By Monday night, the largest pile was close to the chest, standing in the center of the playground, hiding the carousel.
Ms. Yatsko said she longed for life and that the children could run and play freely. “But now, even children’s playgrounds are not safe,” she said.
