Veronika Chuyan threw her body over her two boys as shrapnel from a double-tap strike flew towards them in Kyiv

By Antonia Langford

Antonia Langford is a reporter based in Kyiv who covers Ukraine and Russia. She has also written for The Times, The Guardian and The i, among others. Antonia was shortlisted for Best Early Career Journalist in the Freelance Journalist Awards 2025.

Published 14 June

Jacob, surrounded by balloons on his third birthday, calls out for his mother from his hospital bed.

He last felt her touch clinging to her body while she raced towards a bomb shelter as a Russian missile fell on their Kyiv home.

Their apartment had been shaken four minutes earlier by a missile that landed nearby, wrenching the playground in the courtyard below from its moorings.

Veronika Chuyan, seeing the building opposite engulfed in flames, grabbed Jacob and his brother Jasim, aged five. Years of Russian air strikes had taught her that a second missile – known as a “double tap” – was likely on its way.

They clambered over the upturned wardrobes, broken shelves and family pictures to reach the busy stairwell.

As she exited her apartment building, her neighbours turned right; she turned left towards an underground car park.

Then the second missile struck, its impact so strong that it felt like the earth had split open, witnesses said.

The rocket shredded the residential buildings towering overhead.

She shielded her boys from the debris with her body.

Passers-by grabbed Jacob and Jasim and ran with them into the car park.

Veronika, 28, was dead, her body lying next to a traffic barrier mere yards from safety.

Jacob’s remaining family still cannot find the right moment to tell him what happened to his mother.

“The children were everything to her,” says Mykyta, Veronika’s cousin. “She would have done anything for them.”

Veronika is one of thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed in Russia’s relentless bombardments of Ukrainian cities.

Vladimir Putin has pledged to intensify attacks on the Ukrainian capital as Moscow’s forces stall on the battlefield.

The attacks this month and last have involved missile salvos unprecedented in mass and timed in rapid succession to outpace and exhaust Kyiv’s embattled air defences.

Russia’s bombing campaign last year was described as the deadliest for Ukrainian civilians since the first year of the full-scale invasion, with more than 2,500 killed, and 2026 has so far surpassed its pace. Last month, the number of civilian casualties surged to a 10-month high.

Veronika had always wanted children, her friend Iryna said. She had battled a chronic illness for much of her adult life and defied the odds to give birth to her sons.

At 23, she became pregnant with Jasim and then two years later, with Jacob.

Veronika loved sushi and McDonald’s. She was sporty, artistic, and liked spending time in nature. She was a manicurist whose clients remembered her as chatty, loveable and exceedingly hard-working, and whose friends said she was the most resilient and generous person they knew.

“She never stood aside when there was a problem,” said Lina, who had known Veronika for so long she regarded her as a sister. “I always remember how she used to say, ‘Linchik, everything will be OK.’ And that phrase is still in my head.”

“Nika went through a great deal in life. From an early age, she was always fighting through difficulties. She suffered constantly, but she always held on,” said Iryna. She remembered her friend’s constant hospital visits and her worries as a single mother.

“It’s just a tremendous amount of pain,” Mykyta says, his voice catching with emotion. “It feels as if a piece of me has been torn away. Like part of my soul has been ripped away.”

“We had so many plans together, and with the children too,” Angela Ogannisyan, Veronika’s aunt, says. “She wanted to enrol [her elder son] in dance classes. Dancing, extracurricular activities, English lessons. She wanted to keep them learning and developing.”

Veronika’s mother, who was also there on the night of the strike, lost her leg and remains in an unstable condition in hospital. This leaves Angela to take custody of the children.

The Russian missile that killed Veronika also took the lives of five other people and injured almost 20. Many, like Veronika, were just metres away from safety.

Scotty, a Scottish combat medic in Ukraine, picked his way through the bodies of the dead and the dying. The ground around him was soaked in blood.

He had sped 81 miles per hour down the highway by Dorohozhychi metro station, 1.2 miles away, to reach the wounded after learning of the strike.

Scotty, who is being referred to by his call sign, arrived with another medic two hours before the ambulances. “We had four or five civilians running to us in pure panic. And you can see it in their eyes, you learn that look of desperation,” he says.

Anya Zabolotna, 34, was already in the shelter, watching the injured stream in. “One man had a chunk of flesh torn from his leg,” she recounted. “Another person’s arm had been blown off. Then I saw a child just standing there.”

Nobody could find Jacob’s parents, so Ms Zabolotna, a mother herself, picked him up and held him close. “At first I didn’t realise he was injured. Then my friend ran up calling ‘Anya!’, and at that point, I realised I was covered in blood.”

When she saw Scotty, she recalled: “I didn’t know what to say except thank God.”

Jacob’s arm had sustained serious damage and was bleeding heavily. “There’s an inner voice going, panic, scream, run away,” the Scot recalled seeing the toddler’s injuries. “But you have to default back to your training. Don’t think, just do.”

As Scotty worked frantically to treat the wound, Anya distracted Jacob from the pain. “He kept asking, ‘Where’s my mum? Where’s my grandma?’ He was describing what happened in his own childlike way, saying there was a ‘boom’ and a ‘bang’, stuff like that.”

“So I asked, do you know Paw Patrol? Who’s your favourite character? And he said ‘Skye’.”

Scotty probably saved three lives that night, including Jacob’s. After the ambulances arrived to pick up the wounded, he went home and sat in his car in blood-soaked clothes for 45 minutes, the emotions washing over him.

“Anger, fear, panic, exhaustion, it’s just mentally exhausting in every way,” he recalled. “You’re having that battle of wits inside your brain… it’s a rage you can’t comprehend, the sort of thing where you want to break bones punching walls.”

Meanwhile, Jacob was taken to a children’s hospital, where he has since undergone five operations in an effort to save his arm.

Ms Zabolotna has left Kyiv. “I really can’t move past it,” she said. “I can’t even bring my hands up to my face; I keep smelling blood.”

“All of Kyiv is grieving,” said the officiant at Veronika’s farewell ceremony on Friday, to more than 100 of her tearful friends, family, former teachers, colleagues and clients, who arrived bearing armfuls of flowers, before the burial in her home city of Zhytomyr.

“It is especially painful to realise that in the final moments of her life, Veronika, a loving mother, was trying to save her children,” the officiant added.

In hospital, nurses light candles on a Paw Patrol-themed cake. They sing happy birthday as Jacob cries “Mama, Mama, Mama”.

Additional reporting: Larysa Kramarenko

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/14/the-mother-who-gave-her-life-to-save-three-year-old-son-fro/?__vfz=medium%3Dtray_notification#vf-5d85ae84-24c4-47fe-9860-a3f6bd030842