It only took a second for this boy to become one of the children lost to the war in Ukraine
CBC
It all happened in a second, Serhiy Hulevich repeats over and over again as he recounts the death of his eight-year-old son, Oleksandr.
He anxiously circles the courtyard of his home, showing the newly formed pockmarks and constellation of shrapnel scars from shelling just a few days earlier.
"Everything was in one second. Everything started to fall apart," Serhiy told CBC News just days after his son's death, through a translator, with more shelling in the distance.
It was 11 a.m. on Sept. 3, and some of Serhiy's five children were playing in the courtyard of their small home in Vysunsk, a village in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine.
Then the shelling started. Everyone scattered and three of the kids ran into the home's passway with his wife, Olha Dyriy.
But Oleksandr, or Sasha as he was called, hid in the garage. When the confusion and loud attack ended, Serhiy and Olha went looking for him.
"We were calling him, but everything was quiet," said Olha, her voice shaking, "I couldn't see Sasha."
They found him lying on his stomach next to a motorbike, with severe shrapnel wounds to his head. Serhiy picked him up and put him in a chair. They called an ambulance, but he was already gone.
"Nothing was inside his head," his father says, describing the severity of his son's injuries.
"I wish it would take me, not my kid."
Sasha's gruesome, tragic death was reported in the same way many are now in Ukraine. A message on the social media app Telegram on Sept. 3 read: "As a result of shelling in Mykolaiv and Oblast [region], 6 people were injured … One child was killed."
He died the same week that Save the Children reported a grim statistic: 1,000 children have been killed or injured in the last six months of war in Ukraine. That's an average of five a day, according to an analysis the organization did with verified UN data.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on into its seventh month amid shifting front lines, air strikes and artillery continue to kill and maim civilians, including kids who have no stake in this war, and are powerless to escape.
Sasha liked cars and was a very good boy, his father said. He helped out with his younger siblings and was supposed to start Grade 3 last week.
