Family and colleagues mourn beloved Kyiv teacher killed in a Russian strike
Last week, she perished in a Russian strike on a nine-story building in the Svyatoshinsky district of the capital. The attack, which targeted multiple neighborhoods in Kyiv, claimed the lives of 31 people, including five children, making it the deadliest to hit the capital since the full-scale invasion.
Haiova, 46, was killed along with her sons, Vladyslav, 21, and Roman, 17, and her brother Oleksandr Naralyk, 44. The family was crushed under rubble when their apartment building collapsed over their heads.
On Tuesday, Haiova's friends and family came to pay their last respects before she and her sons and brother were laid to rest in a Kyiv cemetery.
Nadia Kolisnyk, 56, the headmaster of the school where she worked, said that everyone would remember Haiova as a helpful and knowledgeable professional, as well as a creative spirit.
'You saw the beauty she created. All the flowers, the decorations — it was all her golden hands,' Kolisnyk said.
Arthur Kulishenko, 22, a classmate of Vladyslav's, had gone to the scene of the attack and waited for his friend's remains to be found, he said.
'We knew he was under the rubble and just waited,' he said. 'There were just rocks. The building just crumbled there. It collapsed like a sliced cake.'
Haiova had moved during the pandemic to the house which had belonged to her father. She found a job right away in the nearby kindergarten, said her sister Olena Stetsiuk, 46.
When mass drone and missile attacks escalated on the capital in June, Stetsiuk, who lives in a different part of Kyiv, would message her sister and ask her how she was. Haiova would often respond that she was too tired to head to the basement to take shelter. But recent attacks had been so loud and scary she had usually made the decision to go.
Stetsiuk remembers the last shopping trip she made with her sister. They needed to find black garments for a friend's funeral.
'We chose, walked around, laughed,' she said. 'And we chose this blouse with her. She said, take this one. And we went to my place. We sat, discussed it, and looked some more.'
Stetsiuk wore the same blouse to her sister's funeral two weeks later.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
9 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
KYIV, Ukraine—Europe's largest wave of prisoner exchanges since the wake of World War II was set in motion when a Ukrainian soldier reached into the pocket of a dead Russian officer and found a phone. The device landed in the hands of Brig. Gen. Dmytro Usov, a deputy to the head of Ukraine's HUR military intelligence service, which had just lost two of its men in battles northwest of Kyiv. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was only three weeks old, and the phone presented a way to retrieve their remains.
Fox News
15 hours ago
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: Trump understands that safety is for every citizen, not just the lucky few
For decades, Washington, D.C. has been synonymous with crime, murder, and more recently vagrancy, but this week, President Donald Trump is taking a page from an ancient political playbook and looking to finally clean up our nation's capital. "Salus Populi Suprema Lex Est," wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero over 2,000 years ago. It roughly means, "the safety of the people should be the supreme law," and the safety of the ancient Roman citizen, at least for a while, was almost unquestioned. Trump wants Americans to feel just as safe as they live in or visit the seat of our great democracy. Democrats' immediate reaction to Trump's common-sense plan to fight crime in D.C. by surging federal resources and approaches was to play deaf, dumb and blind to the plight of residents, citing statistics that show a recent drop in an already sky-high crime rate. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., perhaps from his Whites only beach club, took to X to claim that this use of the Home Rule act was only triggered by an assault on a DOGE team member. He conveniently left out the two Israeli embassy staff workers recently murdered in cold blood, the congressional aide killed by mistake in a drive-by, and the rise of 15-year-old carjackers. Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., taking time off from his TikTok movie productions, posted several examples of crime in D.C. this week with the insane comment, "Trump owns it." One of these crimes, a murder, took place on Monday, just hours after Trump's anti-crime announcement. Setting aside the congressman's heartless glee in snarking at the president over the murder of an innocent, his ridiculous attack on Trump at least admits that, yes, crime is a big problem in Washington, D.C., one that will finally be tackled. Nobody likes crime, and nobody likes being told they are just imagining it. This is yet another example of Trump's incendiary common sense, by which he does something outlandish, like taking over the D.C. police department, to outrage from opponents who a day later have to admit, OK, yeah, crime is bad. Public safety is a gut issue, and it is also the foundation of all other blessings of good government. This is why Cicero called it supreme. Everyone in D.C. either knows, or has been, a victim or witness of a crime. You can't show them statistics and pretend everything is fine. Opponents of crime prevention display graphs that say the crime rate is down 30 percent this year, but from an already staggeringly high level that has been ignored for years. This is like a guy who loses his entire year's salary playing blackjack. He can likely circle a few weekends when he won big, but he still needs to call Gambler's Anonymous. The obvious model for Trump's anti-crime action in D.C. is the success of Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s in New York City, who slashed violent crime with almost impossible speed. He accomplished this by embracing new police tactics like Compstat crime computing, stop and frisk, and broken windows policing that focuses on smaller quality of life crimes. And the benefits of this miraculous turnaround were not limited to Gotham. Indeed, other cities across America used these innovations to lower crime nationwide. Trump and his administration have the chance to do the same thing with their D.C. efforts, by actually punishing juvenile crime, by seeking to end cashless bail, and by clearing out drug users and vagrants from D.C. parks, national trends could be set. One Democrat who has taken the high road, more or less, amid this takeover by Trump is D.C.'s Mayor Muriel Bowser, who knows exactly how bad crime in D.C. is, having put in place a juvenile curfew just this week, and she has shown an open mind to the endeavor. Traditionally, the Latin word "salus," in the famous quote from Cicero above, means safety, but the word, derived from the Goddess Salus, can also mean health, well-being and prosperity, because, as the ancients knew, all of these are of a piece. Donald Trump envisages a gleaming capital city where even at 2 am one can walk freely, admiring the moon atop the Washington monument in the big skies of D.C., and not just in D.C., but in all American cities. So, let the Democrats hoot and holler a little more if they must. Most Americans are hopeful about this move by the president. Nobody likes crime, and nobody likes being told they are just imagining it. Salus Populi Suprema Lex Est, the primacy of safety is as true today as when it was coined in the days before Christ, and whether he succeeds or fails, Donald Trump is going to try to provide that safety. It should be an effort we can all get behind and support.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Russian soldiers disguised in civilian clothes infiltrating front-line city
Credit: 25th Separate Airborne Brigade (supplied) A photograph shared in a group chat shows two men dressed in civilian clothing walking out of a house in downtown Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine. 'Watch out, these are Russians,' the message reads, in a warning to other members of Ukraine's 25th Separate Airborne Brigade. For weeks now, these war-battered Ukrainian soldiers stationed in the city have not only been attacked by Russian drones but also Vladimir Putin's troops disguised as civilians. Russian forces are using this new tactic to infiltrate Pokrovsk, a key logistical hub, and attack Ukrainian soldiers from within, The Telegraph can reveal. It's part of Russia's race to seize the city and as much Ukrainian territory as its forces will allow ahead of Putin's peace talks with Donald Trump, the US president, on Friday. The Telegraph revealed Ukraine could agree to cede territory already held by Russia as part of a European-backed plan for peace. This would mean freezing the front line as part of Mr Trump's settlement and handing Russia de-facto control of the territory it occupies in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. And Russia's efforts to take as much land as possible are ramping up. Sabotage and reconnaissance units have driven through exposed defences near Dobropillia in Donetsk, marching as far as six miles behind the front line in just 48 hours, battlefield reports say. Their aim is to cut off Pokrovsk and the city of Kramatorsk, another vital stronghold in the Donbas still under Ukraine's control. Yet defiant Ukrainian soldiers are refusing to give up their fight in Pokrovsk, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. It's here that Russian troops are hiding in plain clothes among the population, Illia Petryna, a deputy commander, told The Telegraph. 'We witnessed Russians change from their military clothes, even changing into our uniforms. We find Russian military clothes in areas where we know they were,' he says. The brigade has even intercepted Russian radio chatter in which Russian soldiers discuss these disguises. According to Petryna, their main task is to attack infantry groups or light-armoured vehicles and disrupt Ukraine's logistics. Their secondary task is to communicate with locals and spread disinformation. 'They tell them that there are already 500 Russians who have entered Pokrovsk, to convince them not to help Ukrainians any more,' he says. At least 28 Russian soldiers were identified in the latter half of last month. Petryna says the wave of saboteurs was first detected on July 18 when poor weather limited Ukraine's drone operations and gave Russian troops an opportunity to slip into the city undetected. The saboteurs moved in groups of three or four, occupying abandoned homes and wearing whatever civilian clothing they could find. In one case, a Russian soldier, the last survivor of his unit, was found wearing a Ukrposhta T-shirt, the uniform of Ukraine's state postal service. In a video shown to The Telegraph, a mobile phone recovered from a Russian soldier displays a map of what appears to be Pokrovsk. The map is marked with colour-coded numbers and roads, routes and safe passages used by Russian troops to infiltrate the city. 'We found a route they were using to enter the city,' says Petryna. 'An assault brigade was ordered in and the entrance was closed.' As Ukrainian forces moved along that route, they began finding discarded uniforms in houses. 'That is when we started filtration among civilians,' he says. The filtration process lasted nine days. Ukrainian soldiers went house to house along known infiltration routes, speaking to residents to determine friend from foe. In one building, Petryna says they engaged with Russian troops. Ukrainian forces killed the entire unit by throwing grenades into the basement where they were hiding. Upstairs, they found their discarded Russian uniforms strewn about the rooms. Civilians in Pokrovsk have been helping Ukrainian forces identify the saboteurs. One video shows two elderly residents pointing a Ukrainian drone towards a house where Russian soldiers were hiding. The woman, balanced on her walking stick as she opened the gate for the drone to pass through and kill the troops inside. But their presence can also complicate matters and there are cases where Ukrainian soldiers are unsure who is friend or foe. 'It is very difficult,' says Petryna, recounting a case where a mysterious antenna appeared on the roof of a building. 'Our drones started to fly around this building. [thinking Russians may be hiding there], and first it was a man who came out, and then he showed his wife and his kid.' Because Ukraine does not enforce evacuations from embattled towns, soldiers must constantly decide who is a civilian and who may be an enemy in disguise. This uncertainty also limits the weaponry they can use, often forcing reliance on drones instead of artillery. In addition to carrying out sabotage, Petryna believes Russian soldiers wear civilian clothes out of fear and in the hope of going undetected. He says the brigade has intercepted radio chatter in which Russian troops questioned their purpose. 'They started to ask themselves, 'Why are we here? We do not understand what the task is.'' While some reports suggest the saboteurs could be Russian Diversion and Reconnaissance groups (DRG), a type of special forces, Deputy Commander Petryna says the soldiers found in Pokrovsk are regular infantry, a platoon of about 30 men, split into smaller groups of three or four. 'We are sure they will not send their special forces into Pokrovsk on these assignments because it is almost 100 per cent death,' he says. According to Petryna, these soldiers are used as cannon fodder, sometimes sent into the city as punishment and as a cheap way to gather intelligence on Ukrainian positions. The Ukrainian deputy commander says he heard of one DRG operating in the nearby town of Rodynske, but that group has since been eliminated. 'It is very difficult to hold the defence all up and down the front, especially when the weather is bad. We have found some spaces where they [Russian soldiers] just jump in.' Russian DRG units have been confirmed operating in the wider area. This week, they achieved a major breakthrough north-east of Pokrovsk. Russian assault units followed soon afterwards, establishing positions seven kilometres deep into Ukrainian lines. The breakthrough occurred in fewer than 48 hours. On Tuesday, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's commander in chief of the armed forces, deployed additional troops to Pokrovsk to eliminate saboteur groups in the city. 'The enemy is using its numerical superiority and, despite suffering heavy personnel losses, is trying to infiltrate our front line in small groups,' said Andrii Kovaliov, spokesman for the general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine. For now, Pokrovsk hangs in the balance. Depending on the outcome of Friday's meeting in Alaska between the US and Russia, if Ukraine cannot hold the Donetsk region through diplomacy, Russia may take it by force. It's capture would help secure the entirety of the Donetsk region and boost momentum at a time when the Kremlin is making slow but consistent gains on the battlefield. For those in Ukraine's front-line cities, they will fear that by the time Mr Trump sits down with Putin and any form of peace is agreed, their homes could have already taken by advancing Russian troops. Solve the daily Crossword
