‘Father was lying on the porch with his arm blown off’ – eyewitness to Ukraine’s shelling
The daughter of a man killed by an artillery shell fired by Kiev’s forces in a quiet Russian town just across the border from Ukraine is still in shock. In a night of horror, she also had to save her 11-year-old brother from the bombing.
Andrey Shulyatyev, a 46-year-old father of four, was killed on
Sunday when an artillery shell from Ukraine hit his private house
on the border, in the Rostov Region of Russia.
1 killed, 2 injured: Russia vows response to
Ukraine shelling Russian city
Irina, 20, was woken up in the middle of the night on Sunday by a
sound of an explosion and could not believe it was not all just a
bad dream. The girl was crying throughout her whole interview to
LifeNews, in which she had to relive the ordeal of her terrible
night once again.
“I heard a scream, it was my younger brother, I grabbed him
and ran towards the exit. Then I heard my father’s scream,”
the girl said. “When my brother and I ran up to the door,
glass from the windows shattered again. We stopped. When we went
out to the porch, we saw my father lying there. He was without an
arm. I was in shock, I thought it was a dream, I came back into
the house, then went out again to see him lying there without an
arm. He was screaming. My brother was screaming. We were
bombed.”
Дочь и сын погибшего в Донецке мужчины не смогли вызвать ему скорую https://t.co/UMs9x33JR1http://t.co/SQ3yXhQOv9
— LIFENEWS (@lifenews_ru) July 13, 2014
The girl just knew she had to save her terrified 11-year-old
brother. Irina told him to go hide in the cellar, but the boy was
too scared to go alone, so she had to take him there.
“And my father was lying there,” the girl said, sobbing.
“And I just could not call the ambulance. Then we got out of
the cellar and ran to our neighbors and called for ambulance from
there. But before it arrived, my father died.”
Andrey Shulyatyev’s wife was working the night shift at a local
shop. She could hear the shelling and was frightened when she
could not reach her family by phone. Then her daughter rang.
“She was hysterical,” the woman recalled. “She said
something horrible had happened, they did not even understand
what it was. She said: ‘We jumped over dad who was lying on the
porch and we hid in the cellar.” When I came back from work, they
would not let me come close to the house. It was cordoned
off."
The woman said authorities offered to move her to a hostel, as her house was badly damaged, but she refused.
The same night Shulyatyev was killed, two of his female neighbors
were also injured in the shelling. One of them suffered a shell
fragment wound in the leg; another woman, reportedly 80 years
old, was shell-shocked in her house across the street from the
site of the explosion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his “extreme
concern” over the Ukrainian military's offensive and also
over the incident of an artillery shell from Ukraine hitting a
private house and killing a Russian citizen.
The Russian Foreign Ministry on Sunday described the shelling as
“an obviously aggressive act” on Ukraine’s part and
warned it could have “irreversible consequences.”
The National Security Council of Ukraine declared the same day
that Kiev’s troops involved in the operation in the east of the
country had nothing to do with the shelling incident.
