A Ukrainian man has shared the devastating way he found out his wife and three children had been slain by mortar fire as they tried to flee the city of Irpin on Monday — via Twitter.
Sergii Perebyinis, 43, has described the terrifying plight of his wife Tatiana, 43, and their children Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, nine, as they tried to escape Irpin for the capital, Kyiv.
When President Vladimir Putin ordered
Russian forces to invade Ukraine late last month, Mr Perebyinis was in eastern Ukraine tending to his mother who was in poor health.
Tatiana and the two children were back home in Irpin when one evening, a shell shook their building.
Frightened by the attack, they ran to the basement.
t took two days for the mother and children to summon the courage to evacuate and head to the Ukrainian capital. But as they were loading up their mini van getting ready to go, they saw a
Russian tank coming down their street so they decided to wait.
The next day, the family, along with a church volunteer, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, drove as far as they could in their mini van. After they could not drive any more, they decided to run for their lives across a damaged concrete bridge over the Irpin River where they were then killed by
Russian forces. Their two suitcases, backpacks and case for their dog were found scattered beside them.
Learning of death of his family
Mr Perebyinis had been attempting to locate his wife’s location on his phone. He had a gut feeling that something had gone awry when the application showed that the phone was at Clinical Hospital No. 7 hospital in Kyiv. He tried his wife and his children’s numbers but no one was returning his calls.
Half an hour later, Mr Perebyinis opened Twitter and viewed a post that said that a family of Ukrainians had been killed on a bridge in Irpin. Then, he saw another post which contained an image with luggage.
“I recognised the luggage and that is how I knew,” he told the
New York Times on March 9.
Mr Perebyinis explained that he had spoken to his wife the night before about her plans to leave and apologised that he was not by her side.
“I told her, ‘Forgive me that I couldn’t defend you’,” he said. “‘I tried to care for one person, and it meant I cannot protect you’.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, I will get out’.”
Mr Perebyinis told the
New York Times that his employer, software company SE Ranking, had implored its employees to evacuate immediately from Ukraine and had provided them with emergency funds to do so.
But Ms Perebyinis opted to stay because she did not know how her ailing mother with Alzheimer’s disease would flee and her 18-year-old son wished to remain in the country so he could defend it if needed.
A colleague of Mr Perebyinis, Anastasia Avetysian, said that she had been in contact with Ms Perebyinis about the family’s evacuation.
“We were all in touch with her,” Ms Avetysian told the
New York Times. “Even when she was hiding in the basement, she was optimistic and joking in our group chat that the company would now need to do a special operation to get them out, like
Saving Private Ryan.”
After his family did not survive, Mr Perebyinis vowed to ensure the world knew what was going on Ukraine and that his family’s deaths were not in vain.
He said this was not the first time that his family were displaced because of an invasion.
In 2014, the Perebyinis were living in Donetsk but moved to Ukraine to rebuild their lives after conflict there.