Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on February 1, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 26, 2026
Ihor Yavorskyi, a Ukrainian pensioner, searches for his family presumed dead after a missile attack in Poltava. Rescuers find no signs of life.
By Vitalii Hnidyi
POLTAVA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukrainian military pensioner Ihor Yavorskyi spent all day Saturday at the site of a Russian missile attack to discover what he presumed was the inevitable -- identifying the bodies of three family members he was certain were killed in the strike.
Yavorskyi, 61, stood together with other anxious residents alongside rubble in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava. All were waiting patiently as emergency crews retrieved the bodies of victims from part of an apartment block reduced to rubble in the assault.
Each time, he rushed over to crews carrying victims on stretchers to examine bodies being brought past. But none of those recovered so far were those of his son Dmytro, 37, daughter-in-law Alyona, 38, and granddaughter Sofia, aged nine.
"My son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter are here," Yavorskyi said. "They've been killed here, all three of them. Within a second."
Yavorskyi, a veteran of the military, was assuming the worst. The family lived on the first (U.S. second) floor of the apartment and rescuers told him they had detected no signs of life in the rubble of a collapsed entrance to the building.
"No, again, that's not it," he said after hurriedly checking a new victim being brought out. "That's an elderly person. It's not him."
Around him, crews clambered up and down vast piles of smouldering rubble and made their way through twisted metal and debris. Cranes shifted slabs of concrete out of the way to enable rescuers to sift through the mounds.
Yavorskyi, clad in a simple green raincoat and woollen hat against the damp and cold, lost patience.
"Right from the very collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he had a single goal -- to destroy our great country, Ukraine," he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"That's why I want all of Russia die along with Putin. Everyone will now hate them all for 100 years. He will never stop. Not until he destroys all of Ukraine."
(Reporting by Vitalii Hnidyi, Editing by Serhiy Karazy, Ron Popeski and Diane Craft)
Ihor Yavorskyi was waiting at the site to identify the bodies of his family members, who he presumed were killed in the attack.
Yavorskyi rushed to check each victim being brought out, but expressed disappointment when none were his family members.
Yavorskyi believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to destroy Ukraine and expressed a desire for all of Russia to suffer for the actions taken against Ukraine.
The site was described as having vast piles of smouldering rubble, with emergency crews working to sift through debris to find victims.
Yavorskyi's son is 37, his daughter-in-law is 38, and he also mentioned his granddaughter, who is presumed dead in the attack.
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