Putin’s troops attacked the center of the city of Vinnytsia in western Ukraine on Thursday. The rocket attack killed 23 people, including three children.
Among the victims is four-year-old Lisa. The girl was with her mother Irina D.* (33) in the city when the rocket hit.
D. had uploaded a video to her Instagram story about an hour and a half earlier. You can see little Lisa pushing her own stroller while the two are on their way to the speech therapist. “Where are we going darling?” asks the mother. “To Alla?” asks the mother again. The girl nods in agreement.
“I am the mother of an angel”
As other posts on the woman’s account show, Alla is the speech therapist of the girl who had Down syndrome and could not speak. On the way back from the speech therapy session, the Russian army attacked.
Irina D. regularly posted photos and videos of her daughter and shared parenting tips for her more than 70,000 followers on Instagram. Her bio said: “I am the mother of an angel”.
After the news of the girl’s death, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (44), Olena Zelenska (44), wrote on Twitter that she knew Lisa. The First Lady shared a Christmas video showing the two together.
“We met when we were recording a video for the Christmas holidays. The little girl managed to paint not only herself, her dress, but also all the other children, me, the cameramen and the director in half an hour.”
Mother survives badly injured
The Ukrainian rescue service posted pictures on its Facebook page after the attack on the city. A destroyed stroller can also be seen in the recordings. It should be the car that Lisa is pushing on the video. Another picture shows a similar stroller. A severed foot is lying next to him.
It is unclear whether this is the mother’s foot. As the NGO «Down Syndrome» on Facebook writes, the mother survived the attack with serious injuries and lost no limbs. “You happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the NGO wrote in a funeral post.
Irina D. lived in Kyiv before the war. At the end of February she moved with Lisa to her mother in Vinnytsia.
In March, she wrote under a photo of her daughter that she hadn’t been able to host a normal birthday party for her little one for three years – first because of the corona quarantine and now because of the war. “All hope is on her anniversary, Lisa’s fifth birthday!” That hope has now been shattered by a missile impact. (man)
* Name known