This is the first picture of a Ukrainian school girl killed in her family car alongside her parents by Russian saboteurs, according to local reports.
Polina, a 4th-grade girl from Kyiv, was with her family and two siblings when her family car came under fire from a Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group.
The girl, in her last year of primary school, was among at least 14 children killed since Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday.
The city’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Bondarenko said in a Facebook post that Polina’s brother is receiving treatment at Okhmatdyt children’s hospital and her sister is in intensive care at a second hospital.
“Her name was Polina. She studied in the 4th grade of school in Kyiv. This morning on Teligi her and her parents were shot by Russian DRG,” he said.
Ukraine’s health ministry said on Sunday that 352 civilians had been killed so far.
It also said that 1,684 people, including 116 children, had been wounded.
In Mariupol, where Ukrainians were trying to fend off attack, a medical team at a city hospital desperately tried to revive a 6-year-old girl in unicorn pyjamas who was wounded in Russian shelling.
During the rescue attempt, a doctor in blue medical scrubs, pumping oxygen into the girl, looked directly into the video camera capturing the scene.
“Show this to Putin,” he said angrily. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”
Their resuscitation efforts failed.
Another boy was killed when a block of flats caught fire after being shelled in Chuhuiv, a small town outside Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv.
With Russian troops closing in around Kyiv, a city of almost 3 million, the mayor of the capital expressed doubt that civilians could be evacuated.
Authorities have been handing out weapons to anyone willing to defend the city. Ukraine is also releasing prisoners with military experience who want to fight, and training people to make firebombs.
Russian forces attacked oil and gas facilities sparking huge explosions on Sunday night, but Ukrainian forces were holding off Russian troops advancing on the capital, Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as the assault entered its fourth day.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began with attacks by land, sea and air in what was immediately the largest military assault by one European state on another since World War Two. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation.”
Ukraine’s embattled leader, meanwhile, agreed to talks with Moscow, and Western nations planned to send arms and other supplies to the country’s defenders.
