“My family started walking in the direction of Romanivka [district] across the blown-up bridge in Irpin. My wife with our children and dogs were walking in front, and behind them her father, my father-in-law, was pushing his wife, Tatiana’s mother, in a wheelchair. The first mine fell into the floodplain of the river, to their right. Tatiana and her children rushed forward and hid under the bridge. At that moment, a second mine fell under the bridge. A family of strangers was cut to pieces on the spot. Perhaps this is why my wife and children decided to leave that place and ran forward. In Romanivka, they needed to walk 600 meters to the bus. Somewhere in the middle of this walk, near the church, a third mine fell next to them, which killed them all at once,” says Serhiy Perebyinis, a 43-year-old software engineer from Irpin.
Serhiy’s family tried to escape from the shelling by the Russian military on March 6. At that time, the invaders were trying to take Irpin. Meanwhile, Serhiy was in Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russian-backed militants since 2014. There, the man was looking after his mother, who fell ill with COVID. Perebyinis arrived in Donetsk a week before the war. Within days, the occupation authorities announced mobilization. Serhiy had a Donetsk residence permit, so he could have been drafted.
On February 24, the first day of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, his wife wrote that something had flown past the house. Serhiy urged them to pack an emergency suitcase. He tried to leave the city but failed. At this time, the Russian military shelled Irpin from the side of the occupied city of Bucha. At first, Serhiy’s family hid in the hallways. When Russian invaders fired mortars at the house on March 3, the family went down to the basement and spent two nights there. On March 5, they went up to the apartment and talked to Serhiy about their escape plan.
“We discussed two options—either by car to [the village of] Stoyanka, or to leave the car behind and cross the bridge on foot. Of course, I apologized to my wife for not being with my family. And she did not lose optimism and said: ‘Don’t worry, we will break through. We saw this in 2014. We can do it.’ But they couldn’t,” Serhiy recalls his last conversation with Tatiana.
The family went down to the basement and there was no connection with them. The next morning, according to geolocation, Perebyinis saw his wife’s phone on the Zhytomyr Highway between Kyiv and Stoyanka. Within 20 minutes, geolocation showed that his wife was in a hospital in Kyiv.
“I called my friends who lived in the area. I asked them to go to the hospital immediately and find out what had happened. After a while, I saw a Twitter message that mines had fallen on Romanivka and a family had died: a man, a woman, and two children. And then there was the first photo in which I recognized everyone. I called my friends in Kyiv. I told them that my children were lying on the asphalt, they were dead, it’s not a fake, it’s true. I recognized them, so look for my wife in the hospital. And then the first video appeared which made everything clear.”
Serhiy’s family was in the video. Everyone died.
To bury his family, the man traveled to Irpin for three days. First he got to Russia, then through Poland to Lviv, and from there to Irpin.
Serhiy’s wife received a mortar shrapnel wound to the chest and neck. His son suffered the most because he was the closest to the center of the explosion and actually covered his younger sister. The shell fragments hit the left side of the body, from head to toe. His daughter received one fragment in the left temple, from which she died.
Tatiana worked as a financial director at an IT company. The company relocated its employees to Poland, but the woman refused because she did not want to leave her sick parents. Mykyta, his 18-year-old son, studied programming at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. His 9-year-old daughter Alice was a schoolgirl.
Serhiy is filing documents with the prosecutor’s office and international courts so that the tragedy of his family does not go unnoticed. He wants to give his story maximum publicity, because what Russia has done to his family is a crime against humanity. Serhiy realizes: “I will not return anything of my own, but I want to achieve truth and justice in court.”
Translated by Alina Tsvietkova
