Young Ukrainian volunteer killed delivering aid to dog shelter near Kyiv: ‘She was a hero’
Global News
A young Ukrainian volunteer was shot and killed near Kyiv after delivering supplies to a dog shelter. Her friends say she was targeted at close-range by Russian troops.
As Russian troops closed in on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Anastasiia Yalanskaya insisted she would stay, even while her friends and family fled around her.
The young Ukrainian woman was delivering food to a dog shelter in Bucha, 30 kilometres outside Kyiv, on Friday when she was shot and killed alongside two men she had been volunteering with.
Yalanskaya’s friends and family say her car was deliberately targeted at close-range by Russian troops. Global News has been unable to confirm the circumstances of her death.
Friends do not know why she was targeted, but believe Russian troops are increasingly targeting civilians at random as a way to scare the population into submission.
“I asked her to be extra cautious. That nowadays, a mistake costs extremely much,” her husband Yevhen Yalanskyi says.
“But she was helping everyone around. I asked her to think of evacuation but she did not listen.”
Despite denials from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is mounting – though the total number remains unclear.
As of March 1, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it has recorded 752 civilian casualties. The next day, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said 2,000 civilians had been killed.
