CNN –
Serhiy Haidarzhy is probably alive because his wife Anna fell asleep.
Like every evening, Anna was in the bedroom with her four-month-old boy, Tymofii, while Serhiy put her older daughter, Liza, to bed in her own room.
“Usually, very often, I fall asleep in the room with Liza, then Anya wakes me up and tells me to come to her,” he said at a memorial service on Sunday.
“That night she fell asleep with Tymofii and did not call to me, and so it happened that the Lord took her to himself,” he added.
Anna and Tymofii were killed in a Russian attack early Saturday. A drone turned their apartment in Odessa, southern Ukraine, into a pile of concrete and bricks, leaving only the narrow room where Serhiy and two-and-a-half-year-old Liza slept intact.
Serhiy then spent 16 agonizing hours waiting in the building's courtyard, hoping his wife and baby were alive. When rescue workers finally found them, both were dead.
“I was very afraid that they had suffered, but the doctors said they had died in their sleep. “They were found in the same position where they fell asleep, they were together,” he told the congregation, according to video of the event seen by CNN.
A relative of Anna told CNN that Liza doesn't understand what happened to her mother and brother. She was told that they were now in heaven.
Courtesy of the Haidarzhy family
The photo shared by the Haidarzhy family shows Anna and Tymoffi sleeping on the day of the attack.
Odessa, a strategically important city in southern Ukraine, is no stranger to Russian attacks. But Saturday's attack on a high-rise apartment building was particularly brutal. Twelve people were killed and 20 others were injured, some critically.
Locals reeled in grief and anger, and the site of the attack is now covered with flowers, candles and toys.
Investigators are trying to determine what type of drone was used in the attack. The damage it caused to the building was significant, as was the number of people killed, leading some to speculate that the drone may have been modified to have a greater impact.
“It is possible that the drone's warhead could have been additionally strengthened, as such destruction does not occur very often. “We see that the enemy is gradually increasing the combat share of drones,” Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for Southern Operation Command, told CNN.
Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP/Getty Images
People visit the remains of the building hit by a Russian drone in Odessa, leaving flowers and toys at the site of the attack that killed twelve people.
According to Odessa officials, five children, including Tymofii, were among the 12 people killed.
Three of the children were from the same family and were killed along with their parents Tetyana and Oleh Kravets, both of whom served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The couple and their seven-month-old daughter Lisa were found on Saturday. Eight-year-old Zlata and nine-year-old Sergiy were the last to be rescued from the rubble on Sunday.
The fifth child killed in the attack was only identified by local media as three-year-old Mark. His father Vitaliy also died, while his mother Anastasia was injured and is in intensive care.
The Regional Directorate of the Territorial Defense Forces South, the unit in which Oleh Kravets served, described him as “a soldier who set an example for his courage and bravery, determination and resilience, and fulfilled his military duty with full dedication and devotion to his homeland.” .”