Pensioner waits at missile attack site to identify bodies of family, presumed dead

By Vitalii Hnidyi

POLTAVA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Ukrainian military pensioner Ihor Yavorskyi spent all day Saturday at the site of a Russian missile attack to discover what he presumed was the inevitable — identifying the bodies of three family members he was certain were killed in the strike.

Yavorskyi, 61, stood together with other anxious residents alongside rubble in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava. All were waiting patiently as emergency crews retrieved the bodies of victims from part of an apartment block reduced to rubble in the assault.

Each time, he rushed over to crews carrying victims on stretchers to examine bodies being brought past. But none of those recovered so far were those of his son Dmytro, 37, daughter-in-law Alyona, 38, and granddaughter Sofia, aged nine.

“My son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter are here,” Yavorskyi said. “They’ve been killed here, all three of them. Within a second.”

Yavorskyi, a veteran of the military, was assuming the worst. The family lived on the first (U.S. second) floor of the apartment and rescuers told him they had detected no signs of life in the rubble of a collapsed entrance to the building.

“No, again, that’s not it,” he said after hurriedly checking a new victim being brought out. “That’s an elderly person. It’s not him.”

Around him, crews clambered up and down vast piles of smouldering rubble and made their way through twisted metal and debris. Cranes shifted slabs of concrete out of the way to enable rescuers to sift through the mounds.

Yavorskyi, clad in a simple green raincoat and woollen hat against the damp and cold, lost patience.

“Right from the very collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he had a single goal — to destroy our great country, Ukraine,” he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“That’s why I want all of Russia die along with Putin. Everyone will now hate them all for 100 years. He will never stop. Not until he destroys all of Ukraine.”

(Reporting by Vitalii Hnidyi, Editing by Serhiy Karazy, Ron Popeski and Diane Craft)