On the night of 18 May, four-year-old Mark Ifiemenko was at home with his parents in Vasylkiv, a small town near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. As the sounds of explosions reverberated close to their two-storey home, Mark’s mother rushed him downstairs, along with his grandparents.
Later it would emerge that overnight, Russia had launched one of the largest attacks on Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, with reports of more than 270 drones and missiles entering the country’s airspace.
Mark and his family hid in a room they believed was the safest, removed by at least two walls from the exterior of the house – a rule Ukrainians have learned to stay alive. Meanwhile, his father, Sergey, rushed to the kitchen to turn off the gas main. As he did so a Shahed drone – the size of a small car – hit their house.
“There was smoke and dust everywhere, I couldn’t even breathe. I started calling out to them [his family] and ran to the room they were in,” says Sergey, 31, who had returned from service on the frontline the previous week.
“I first saw my father and mother, they were injured. I asked my mother where Anna [his wife] and Mark were to which she replied Anna was no longer with us. I was holding a flashlight and when I pointed it down, I saw I was standing over my wife’s body … a fragment of the drone had pierced her head. Still, even in death, she was curled protectively around Mark, who was crying,” he says.
Soon after rescuing him from his mother’s dying embrace, Sergey rushed Mark, amid ongoing attacks, to the house of a nearby relative and returned to help his parents. The next morning Mark was transported to Ohmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv where he spent 10 days in the intensive care unit, most of it in a coma.
Mark survived the attack, says Sergey, thanks to his mother’s quick thinking and protection, but he has endured injuries and a trauma that will take many years to heal. He suffered from fractures to his skull, a crushed nose and injuries that have left him blind in one eye.
There has been a significant rise in child casualties in Ukraine in recent months as Russia indiscriminately targets heavily populated civilian areas, with 222 children killed or injured between March and May this year and 2,889 in total since the start of the invasion. Given the delay in verifying deaths, the UN says the true number is likely to be much higher.
Ukrainian rights group say Russia’s attacks are not accidental and should be more strongly condemned by international leaders. “Under international humanitarian law, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure – especially schools, hospitals, and places where children gather – is considered a war crime,” says Daria Kasyanova, chair of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network.
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