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They escaped war in Ukraine. It found them in Israel.
In the end, war caught up with them.
On June 15, an Iranian missile strike on a residential building in Bat Yam killed all five family members, as Israel and Iran engaged in escalating air assaults. The news reverberated through Ukraine, stirring grief and outrage.
Rescue workers searched for trapped residents after an Iranian missile barrage hit buildings in Bat Yam, Israel, on June 15. A family of five Ukrainians was killed by an Iranian missile strike in Bat Yam.
AVISHAG SHAAR-YASHUV/NYT
The deaths are an intersection, in human terms, of two wars until now connected mostly by geopolitics and arms deals. Iran was a key supplier of attack drones to Russia in the first year of its Ukraine invasion, and Moscow has long backed Tehran's regime.
Beyond geopolitics, the deaths carried a cruel irony. The family members were killed by war in the very country they believed would shield them from it, with its powerful air defense system that Ukraine has long envied.
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'I really thought they'd be safe,' said Artem Buryk, Anastasiia's father and Pieshkurova's ex-partner. 'I never thought they'd go to Israel to escape war — and find it there.'
Buryk, who volunteered for the Ukrainian army to repel Russia's full-scale invasion more than three years ago, hoped, like many other Ukrainians, to keep war from reaching his family.
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Anastasiia's cousin Kostiantyn.
VIA KHRYSTYNA CHANYSHEVA/NYT
Buryk, 39, said he learned of his daughter's death the day she died, after returning from the front lines near Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, a current focal point of fighting. 'I still don't understand what's happening,' he said in a phone interview last week. 'I still can't believe it.'
When war broke out in early 2022, Anastasiia and Pieshkurova were living in Odesa, Ukraine's main port on the Black Sea. Despite the fighting, they tried to live as normally as possible. Anastasiia rode her scooter through the streets, wore a red striped Minnie Mouse top in the summer heat, and celebrated her 5th birthday on Odesa's terraces, as shown on Instagram posts by her mother.
Later that summer, Anastasiia began running a fever, her father said. Doctors soon diagnosed her with leukemia. When her father visited her in the Odesa hospital in early September, taking leave from the army, she sat in bed wearing his military cap and flashed a victory sign with her fingers.
Her condition worsened.
Buryk said there had been some discussion of transferring Anastasiia to Okhmatdyt, Ukraine's largest children's hospital, which was later destroyed by a Russian missile. But cancer treatment in Ukraine had been scaled back as hospitals filled with war casualties. The family chose Israel, hoping its advanced care could save Anastasiia.
Anastasiia, her mother, and her grandmother, Olena Sokolova, moved to Israel in December 2022 and settled in Bat Yam, a city just south of Tel Aviv with a large community of immigrants from former Soviet countries. They were among the 20,000 or so Ukrainians who found refuge in Israel during the war, according to Ukraine's ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk.
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Treatment began immediately and was crushingly expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pieshkurova turned to social media for financial help, posting photos of her pale, often bald daughter in her hospital bed. At times, she shared videos of Anastasiia's father, in full military gear, pleading for support during short breaks from the front.
'Masha did everything for her little girl,' said Khrytsyna Chanysheva, Anastasiia's godmother, using a diminutive for Pieshkurova. 'She dedicated her life to her, moved to Israel to get her full treatment.'
The treatment was painful, but charity workers who helped the family in Israel said Anastasiia held on. 'Every time I walked into her room, she would smile,' said Lada Fichkovsi, who helped care for Anastasiia. 'She was in pain, and she would close her eyes for a second.'
In May last year, Anastasiia's spirits were lifted by the arrival of her two cousins -- Illia, 14, and Kostiantyn, 10. Their home city of Odesa, which had been relatively spared in the early months of Russia's invasion, was under near-daily attack.
'Because of the shelling, my children were crying, and I decided to let them go,' said Hanna Pieshkurova, Mariia Pieshkurova's sister.
By then, Israel's war with Hamas had been raging for months, and the Palestinian armed group was regularly launching rockets into Israeli cities. Hanna Pieshkurova said her sister reassured her that air raid sirens in Bat Yam had sounded only once or twice at most. 'It's quiet, calm, and there are safer bomb shelters there,' she recalled being told.
What's more, Israel had the Iron Dome defense system, capable of intercepting many rockets and missiles, and long admired by Ukraine as a model for defending against Russian attacks.
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'Ukrainians often say, 'This is not Ukraine; it's not as scary,'' said Inna Bakhareva, who runs Chance4Life, a charity supporting seriously ill children and their families, primarily from the former Soviet bloc, during treatment in Israeli hospitals.
'They felt secure due to the Iron Dome; they believed it wasn't as dangerous here,' Bakhareva said.
After Israel launched a large-scale surprise air assault on Iran, prompting Tehran to retaliate with a barrage of missiles, war was impossible to ignore.
'Dad, at night I saw how the missiles were falling,' Anastasiia said in a voice message to her father late June 14, shortly before her death.
The next morning, she and her mother were scheduled to go to the hospital to decide the next phase of her cancer treatment.
They never made it. An Iranian missile struck their multistory building early June 15, reducing much of it to rubble. The damage was so devastating that it took four days to retrieve and identify the body of Anastasiia's mother.
Hanna Pieshkurova has lost nearly her entire family — her mother, her two children, and her sister. Buryk lost his former partner and his only child.
'Every time I talked to her, I'd say, 'Sweetheart, we'll go fishing. Just us,'' he said last week. 'That's all — fishing, fishing, fishing. And now I just don't understand. I still don't even grasp that she's gone. Last night, I sent her voice messages.'
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