Artem Shevchenko was killed in a bomb blast near the northern city of Kharkiv, a part of the northeastern part of the country where Russian bombings have risen sharply in recent days. Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, is only 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border. Nine civilians were killed and more than 50 were injured Friday in an attack in a residential area of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian president’s office said. “Please open your eyes, my bunny. “Please,” said Nina Shevchenko, recorded in a moving video by the Associated Press mourning her son. The boy’s grandmother arrived as people came to pick up his body. “Let me see him! My baby. My golden sunshine! ” cried the grandmother. “My favorite sunshine. We just talked today. My dear, why should I live, if you are gone? I lived for you. My Sunshine. Damn them all! “They must find no place, neither on earth nor in paradise.” “I lived for you,” Nina Shevchenko told her son. “Please open your eyes,” he said, touching his face before ambulances and neighbors took the boy in a body bag. A seven-month-old baby was also killed in the bombings. In the hallway of another building, a young girl burst into tears as she recounted the horror of the attack and how she was saved only when “a woman, God forbid, covered me with her body.” Outside, bloodied people lay in pain in the streets, where ambulances arrived to treat them. Amid burnt cars and wreckage, a man who had helped his friend get into an ambulance spoke out against Russian forces, whose invasion sparked war in his country. “What did this guy do to them (the Russians)?” asked Sergei Kirichenko, a friend of the injured. “With whom should we make peace?” Kirichenko asked. “With these monsters?” The Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian military strikes in the Kharkiv region “cleared a group of mercenaries from a Polish private military company” of up to 30 people and “liberated” an iron and steel factory in the port of Mariupol in southern Ukraine. The claims could not be independently verified.
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