When wars kill many over years, the names of the dead can bleed into faceless lists.
But each loss still burns a black hole in the worlds they left behind. And few more so than Tymur Hryhorenko.
Most of the bald facts of his death are horrifyingly unremarkable, after three years of Russian bombardment. He was the only death from a huge 4:40 a.m. local time, Russian airstrike that hit a top floor apartment in the frontline town of Kramatorsk on July 22.
But Tymur, 10, one of the most recent children to die in Russia’s war on Ukraine, had lost his father to the war two years earlier, and had demanded to visit his grandmother in Kramatorsk. He was just nine hours away from catching the train, with his mother Nastya, to the relative safety of Kyiv.
Video posted by Donetsk emergency services shows Tymur’s limp, bloodied body, apparently still with a pulse, being resuscitated on the floor outside the ruined apartment. His mother had left him that night with his grandmother, but rushed back to the scene.
