These heartbreaking photos and videos from Kharkiv momentarily swept around the world: a man kneeling near the body of his son, holding his hand and reading prayers for two hours. “The father’s raw pain as he prayed by his dead son was one of the most heart-wrenching images of the almost five months of war,” according to Daily Mail.
On July 20 – the International Chess Day – Viktoria Kubata, an international women’s chess master and chess coach, didn’t feel well and so could not see her children, 13-year-old Dmytro and 15-year-old Ksenia, to dancing lessons, as she usually did. The kids decided to take a trolleybus, and at 9:30 a.m. they were at the stop, waiting. At that moment, the Russian barbarians resumed shelling Kharkiv with MLRS missiles, killing three and wounding 25 people.
Dmytro died instantly as a rocket fragment hit his heart. Ksenia was seriously wounded but managed to hail a car, and the driver saved her life by immediately bringing her to a hospital. She was operated on at once, and the doctors took out all fragments except the one in her lungs. It was risky both to try to remove it and leave it there. Finally, they decided to take a chance and successfully extracted the last fragment.
It seems the Kremlin tends to align its war crimes with an international calendar of dates. It is true at least for the Kubatas’ family, as the school of their children was destroyed by the Russians on International Children’s Day, June 1.
Natalia Zhukova, Ukrainian chess grandmaster and two-time European women’s champion, a friend of the Kubatas’ family, said in disbelief: “His father read prayers for two hours, all this time holding his son’s hand. And at this time Russian and Belarus chess players are calmly playing chess. Because this is not their war?”
Russia is a terrorist state, and every Russian whether speaking in support of the war or keeping mum about it is an accomplice. Burn in hell!
