Kyiv Teenager mourn her friend who was killed by Russian rocket (photos)

On a sunny but cool Monday after the lessons had already started in Kyiv schools, numerous teenagers with a grim face filled a crematorium hall in the main cemetery in Kyiv.

They had come to say goodbye to their friend and classmate Donylo Khudia, a 17-year-old, whose coffin was adopted next to those of his parents, Viktoriia and Oleh, around the fireplace where their bodies were cremated after the farewell ceremony.

The Khudia family slept at home when a Russian rocket hit her apartment building on April 24 and killed 13 people in the fatal attack by Ukraine in almost a year.

Danylos younger sister, 14-year-old Yana, was the only person in the family who survived the strike. A video of her dusty, expressionless face, which looked out of the rubble, while the first aiders fought to raise the concrete slabs, and advocated: “Wait, Yanochka, we'll get you out,” became viral online.

On April 28, Yana could not get to the funeral of her parents and brother due to her injuries. Her two survivors older siblings, a brother and a sister in her early 20, stood in the front row, compared to a young girl with long brown hair – Danylos girlfriend, whose mother had to keep her around her waist with one arm when she approached the box.

“Danylo was the brightest person I knew in my eighteen years,” said a young man when everyone was invited to say something about the family.

When short speeches had ended the rites between the high -towering crematorium walls and the priest, hundreds of people slowly flowed past the coffins, left flowers and spoke to the dead one last time.

A soldier put scarlet red carnations on Oleh's coffin, who was also a soldier and had recovered from a wound at home.

Boys, whose Chins hardly had more than Peach Fuzz, came to Danylos coffin to place flowers when Danylos grandmother screamed in a wheelchair: “Dania! Why?”

During the most part of the ceremony, Danylos looked stoically closely male friends and stood in a narrow group behind his survivors.

But when Danylos coffin was lowered in the fireplace, many young men covered their faces, bite the tears back and gave each other their shoulders.

After the strike, Danylos friends were all day behind the bureaucracy -cord, in the hope that he would be found alive.

“We recorded videos: 'Come on, Dania, we are waiting for you!' Or write to him, ”said Varvara Shustova, 15, member of the Freundesgruppe from Donylo. “Nobody thought they had died first.”

“I could never believe that it could happen to us. To Dania. That we will all go through together,” she told the Kyiv Independent after the funeral.

Memorial of the fallen soldiers of Ukraine: It was asked to be cremated so that future fighters do not dig trenches in our bones

Note from the publisher: The following is the first in a series of reports of the Kyiv Independent about the memorial of the fallen soldiers in Ukraine. “I am ready for cremation,” Kostiantyn “Kostia” Yuzviuk wrote in a list of funeral inquiries in his newly created telegram channel for friends in November 2022