Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.

Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.  The young mother was buried with the baby in her arms.  A terrible tragedy then excited the world, the pictures spread all over the world, and the deceased Christina was then called the Gorlovka Madonna.

 Two years have passed since the murder of the "Gorlovskaya Madonna"...

 

 On July 27, 2014, the city of Gorlovka was subjected to massive shelling by Ukrainian security forces.  The Grad multiple launch rocket launchers were launched.  As a result of shelling Gorlovka from heavy guns from July 27 to July 29, 100 people were injured, 27 more died, four of them were children, the city council reported.  Among the dead were Christina Zhuk and her daughter.  A picture from the square on Rudakova Street, which depicts the dead Kristina and Kira, was posted on the Internet by blogger Oleg Zhelyabin-Nezhinskiy.

 

 After filming at the scene of the tragedy, he immediately posted the photos on Facebook, as a result of which they scattered around the world in a couple of hours, but without his signature.  Then the photographs appeared in the publication already with the signature of Zhelyabin-Nezhinsky.  The mother of the deceased girl later contacted him, asking him to delete the pictures, but to no avail.  However, now it is no longer in his power.  And not in anyone else.  The photo became known to almost everyone, it was repeatedly copied and published.

 In his statement to the press, Zhelyabin-Nezhinsky said that he came to Gorlovka on his own initiative to film the truth about the war: “I clenched my teeth and did what I came for - not to blame someone, or look for the guilty, but to show people the truth -  what is it like for ordinary civilians to live during this war.  ... But someone gives orders and sets goals.  Someone considers "accompanying casualties among the civilian population" acceptable.  It is to them that we must reach out, let our condemnation by the whole world begin to save innocent lives.

  … Do not remain indifferent.  Imagine yourself in the place of those people on whose houses shells fall.  After all, they can turn in your direction.

 It is hard not to agree with these fiery lines.  However, Zhelyabin did not dare or did not want to say “Kyiv” directly when it comes to the victims of shelling and who is to blame for these victims ...

 And what happened after that?

 Later, information about the identity of the deceased girl appeared on the Internet.  She had a VKontakte page.  Her nickname is Kristina Sergeevna.  Judging by her blog, this is Kristina Zhuk.  She was 23 years old, on September 6 she was supposed to turn 24. Her daughter's name was Kira, and she was 10 months old.

 On the web, on the page, she posted photos of her - straw hair, bangs to the eyebrows, a gentle, pretty smiling face - and her baby in a lace envelope.

 Christina lived in Kyiv, came to Gorlovka to her mother.  The women were about to leave the city due to the deteriorating military situation, the departure was already planned.  However, it turned out that it was not fate.  Now Kristina will stay in Gorlovka forever - she was buried with her daughter at the local cemetery, in a hurry because of the fear of new shelling, on July 29th.

 Christina's mother: “Almost no one came to the funeral, because basically everyone left, and those who remained were simply afraid of the bombing.  I buried my girls myself.

 The mother of the "Gorlivka Madonna" wrote a letter to the mother of Poroshenko's children.

 A resident of Gorlovka, who lost her 23-year-old daughter Kristina and 10-month-old granddaughter Kira during the shelling, whose photograph has spread all over the world, demands to find and punish the perpetrators.

 ***

 "WHO GIVED THE ORDER TO KILL MY CHILDREN?"

 I met Natalya and her youngest daughter Daria at the railway station in Kyiv.  In the look of a beautiful, once happy woman, today there is deep pain, sadness and emptiness.  On a notebook sheet, she wrote a letter to Marina Poroshenko and, sitting in the waiting room, plunged into painful memories.

 "LIFE HAS STOPPED AND THERE IS NOTHING ELSE"

 Natalia, please accept my condolences!  If you can, tell us what happened on that tragic day when your children died?

 - On that day, July 27, I was at home, it was Sunday.  Our suitcases stood packed on the doorstep for several days, but for several days we could not leave Gorlovka.  Wherever we call, in boarding houses or other places, everywhere with a small child they were not accepted.  And the last two days and trains did not go.  I was ready to run out of the house onto the road, catch some car and arrange for us to be taken away from the city at least somewhere.

 But suddenly I got a call from a man who was taking people out of Gorlovka and said that he would pick us up the next morning.  Our apartment on the 8th floor of a building in the city center is large and spacious.

 I went to the open window, from which, as if on the palm of your hand, you can see the square and immediately called my daughter, Christina, to share the news.  At that time she was walking on the street with my granddaughter Kirochka.  "Kristyusha! - I shout to her on the phone, - that's it, tomorrow at 9 am we leave! First to Svyatogorsk, and from there to Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk or the Odessa region."  She is in the phone with joy: "Hurrah! - shouts, - Kirill, we're leaving tomorrow! Hurray, grandmother, we're leaving!".  I asked her: “Kristina, where are you?” “In the square,” she answered. “Stay where you are,” I say, and as soon as I said these words, the square began to be bombed with Grad.

 This was the first shelling of the city from these installations.  Explosion after explosion, fire, smoke and all.  My world swam before my eyes.  I ran out of the apartment to the street shouting "Kira! Christina! Kira! Christina!"  By the time I got there, the park was already quiet.  I didn't find my children.  Falling through the shell craters, I sorted the grass with my hands, looking for toys, but, not finding them, I thought that everything was in order.  My only thought was that they were in a bomb shelter.

 I go there, I ask, "Were there any children?"  People, seeing that I was in a panic, pushed me inside, saying, they say, yes, there were children.  There was no light in the bomb shelter, and I, running there in the dark, touched the head of every person, shook people's hands, felt them.  She was looking for her children and shouted: "Kira! Christina!"  no one responded.

 She touched everyone, screamed and called her children in every corner.  Then, someone left the shelter and returned with a female doctor.  She used something to chip me with the words: "You're disturbing everyone here."  And then they told me that everything is fine with my children, and the child only hurt the handle.

 A couple of hours later, when the volleys subsided, we left the bomb shelter and I ran to the children's clinic, because we have everything nearby: our house, school, children's and adult polyclinic square, Lord, the morgue in this territory.  In the children's clinic, they told me to look in an adult.  I go there.  And then a flurry of calls from friends began: "Go to the morgue, go to the morgue, go to the morgue."  They saw pictures of my dead girls on the Internet.  The photographer from Correspondent, who was at the scene and took pictures of my murdered girls, immediately posted the pictures on the network.  It was hell.  In the morgue, I found my girls.  Recognized…

 And then again the bombing and this bomb shelter, from which no one was let out all night.  In the morning I went to the morgue again.  But I was not allowed to take them home.  "Why would your children be bombed twice?"  the doctors told me.  At least let them take them home.  No, the girls were taken straight from the morgue to the cemetery.

 On July 29, my girls were buried very quickly.  They hurried me all the time: "Faster, faster" - they were afraid that they would bomb again.  And then - everything!  Further, life has stopped and there is nothing more.  Everything is emptiness.  Then you just howl like a wolf and nothing around.  Nothing at all.

 The politicians decided that I could not be a mother or a grandmother, that we could no longer rejoice or laugh.  We have been deprived of all this.  I howled, howled.  All night after the funeral, I slept on their grave.  After all, what difference does it make, they bomb everywhere anyway!

 Did the photographer who took these photos and posted them online contact you after the incident?

 We contacted him.  They asked him to delete these photos, but to no avail.  This is Oleg Zhelyabin-Nezhinsky, a blogger who publishes on Korrespondent.  He took pictures of the tragedy and immediately posted them on Facebook.  In just a couple of hours, these photos were scattered on the net around the world.  Once he gave an interview to the BBC-Ukraine, in which he expressed his disappointment that photographs in the media and on the Internet are published without his name as the author.

 Zhelyabin took pictures of our dead girls, put them on display for the whole world, but he only cares that the photos are not signed with his name!  He doesn't care that these horrible photos hurt us and are now almost impossible to remove.  They are literally in all social networks, on Odnoklassniki, on Facebook, Vkontakte ... They wanted to sue him, but we know that this will not affect him in any way, lawyers can protect him and we will not achieve anything.  He continues to publish photos on his Facebook page in an enlarged size.  I didn't want them to be seen like that.  They were quite beautiful and smart little girls.

 

 "IF THESE ARE NOT ATO TROOPS, THEN LET THEM PROVE"

 - I arrived in Kyiv on August 1 to find those responsible for the murder of my girls.  First of all, I went to the presidential administration, under which stood the mothers of the soldiers.  I wanted to talk to them.  I brought photos of my girls, I wanted to talk to the mothers, I wanted to say that we have the same mothers in the Donbass, like them, whose sons are going to fight.  But the security did not let me in, even though I said that I just wanted to talk to the mothers.  In response, they told me that they were protecting the President from terrorist attacks.  But why is the President guarded from me, but the President did not save my children?  The fact that the President gives orders to kill my children - is this considered normal in our country?  Why can't we just live, raise children, just breathe?  People are shot, people are killed, people fill their grief with tears.  Some have lost heart after the death of their relatives, they do not know how to act and how to live with it.  Many have reconciled.  I can't accept.  Because my children lived in a legal state.  Without a declaration of war, some kind of hostilities are going on, and we are being shot.  Why are all our rights being violated?  Declare war, evacuate the inhabitants and fight.  But that doesn't happen.  People are abandoned.

 Many people think that since we are from the Donbass, since we stayed there, it means that we have some point of view.  And no one knows that people just want peace.  Many don't even have anywhere to go.  Lots of seniors, lots of kids.  And they are simply bombed from the "Grads" from the air, in different ways.  I want to know who was shelling Gorlovka then.  I assume that the ATO troops fired, but if this is not the case, let them provide evidence.  Both the ATO troops and the DPR troops.  Let them provide evidence of their guilt or innocence.  I want the ATO army to provide evidence that their "Grad" installations did not work on Sunday, July 27 at 14:00 and did not shell our city!

 I have already written statements to the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the fact of the murder of Christina and Kira, as well as on the fact of distribution of photographs from the scene of the tragedy.  She wrote a statement to the SBU regarding the death of Christina and Kira "on the fact of a terrorist act."

 I want them to think about who they are bombing in these cities.  Why aren't they doing other things?  And what kind of state is this that did not protect my rights and the rights of my children to life?  Why such a power, if it does not need people?  A state without people?  They are killing us!  It's just a shooting.

 I really want the mothers and relatives of the victims to get involved, so that they also write statements and fight.  I am preparing an appeal to the military prosecutor's office.  In Kyiv, lawyer Sasha Dvoretskaya helps me, I thank her very much.  After all, bureaucracy is everywhere, you need to know the forms of applications so that everything is done correctly.

 - Did the lawyer advise you to apply to the SBU with the wording of the statement "on the fact of a terrorist act"?

 - Yes.  But she always consults with someone.  After all, such statements are being made for the first time.  Even the SBU, when accepting our applications, did not know how to draw them up and how to register them.  It was the same in the police - even the higher authorities consulted on how to draw up, because we had no war before and the state had not shot people before.  But since the state has taken such liberties as mass murder, let them give an explanation.

 

 "I BURIED MY GIRLS MYSELF"

 - You say that the girls were not seen after the shelling.  Do you know who carried the bodies of your children?

 - It was a local resident Sergei.  He passed by and, seeing my dead girls on the ground, he collected them and took them to the morgue.  He said this in the morgue, so that the girls would not be separated.  I turned to people through the Internet to find it and found it.  He came on the day of the funeral.  Then I did not specify his last name, I only know that his name is Sergey and he has three children - boys 14 and 4 years old and a girl 13 years old.

 We called him up, but since August 5 he has not been in touch.  I really want to find him again and never lose him again.  I am very worried about him, because they are bombing again.  For me, this person became very dear, and I lost him again (crying).  While I was there, he himself called me every day.  After all, when the girls died, I was not able to think about anything at all, besides, day and night in bomb shelters.  Even for identification at the morgue, I did not go from home, but from a bomb shelter.  Almost no one came to the funeral, because basically everyone left, and those who remained were simply afraid of the bombing.  I buried my girls myself.

 - Natalya, tell us, what were Christina and Kira like?

 - We have always lived very happily, and in our house there were always laughter and friends.  The girls were studying.  We never quarreled.  Though the town is small, but they lived their happy lives.  Christina was smart.  She graduated from our Horlivka Institute of Foreign Languages.  I wanted to achieve a lot in life.  She loved her girl Kirochka very much, she so wanted and so waited for her birth.  Even when she walked with a tummy all the time she said: "When Kirochka will appear."  She knew what the baby would be called, what she would be.

 

 

 When Kirochka was born, Christina did not let her go.  Kira sang songs endlessly - she woke up in the morning and screamed from the bedroom: "Bah! Bah!"  and began to sing songs.  Our neighbors all laughed, because from the first day we constantly sang songs to her.  Neighbors asked, they say, who sings there?  I sang, Christina sang.  She put on French songs and Kirochka was already humming something.

 

 

 Since six months, we have been waiting for her teeth all the time.  In the morning we get up and look into the mouth, hoping to see a tooth.  They never cut through.  The doctor told us all the time that there are no children without teeth, they say, stop looking and they will grow up.  But they never grew up.  Until now, there is a feeling that they just went out for a walk and will return now, and I will grumble in the evening that, they say, you returned so late, because it's time to swim.  Every time they lingered, they came and shouted: "Hurrah! Grandma, we learned to crawl!"  or "Hurrah! Grandma, we learned to walk!", "Hurrah! We wove the first wreath!".

 

 Kirochka has just learned to walk.  In this square they walked 2-3 times a day, they almost never left, there, in this grass, they learned to crawl and walk.  They lived in this park and died there.

 

 Christina was in a hurry to live all the time.  She so wanted to live, all forward and forward.  Even our Kirochka was born prematurely to her - at the eighth month of pregnancy ...

 How are you coping with this tragedy?

 - I fall into the grass and howl like a she-wolf, and when people appear, I get up and hold on.  I leave the countryside and again howl and howl.  Previously, everything was necessary: ​​you go through the store, and you needed a hairpin, and a toy.  And now it's empty.  You go and you don’t need anything, nothing at all (crying - ed.).  You do not need to eat or drink, nor do you need this beauty.  And these children... all around children.  Dasha managed to be taken out two days before the incident and sent to Kyiv to the student hostel where she studies.  When she found out that Christina and Kirochka had died, she sobbed sobbing that she hated people.  I cried on the phone why she was in Kyiv.  I wanted to go back to Gorlovka, I wanted to quit my studies.  That night, when I spent the night at the grave, Dasha could not get through to me.  And the next day, in tears, he says: "Mom, I'll come."  And then my heart nearly stopped.  "Dasha," I say, "I'll pick up the phone, just don't come here."  And when the telephone connection was lost, I ran as fast as I could to the highway where there was a connection.  I was afraid that she was about to get ready and come to Gorlovka.  I was afraid to lose her too.  After all, Dasha and I, apart from Kristinochka and Kirochka, have no one else, neither grandmothers nor grandfathers.  There are no relatives.  Only we had each other, me, Dasha, Christina and Kirochka.  Now we are left in this world with Dasha together.

 

 Once I read one of Marina Poroshenko's comments, in which she says that her favorite pastime is taking care of her husband and children.  Ask Pani Marina, who should I care about now, when my children were killed?  She thanks Ukrainian mothers for raising patriotic sons.  Why are the sons of people's deputies and others who hold high positions not there, in the war?  Why do they send boys who don't understand anything?  It is very important to me that she sees my letter.  Somewhere she comes to work, somewhere she does something.  I just want her to read my letter with the questions I want to ask her.

 Dear Mrs Marina!

 They killed my kids!  They killed my birds, my doves.  Ask your husband WHY?

 Why, when your children have the opportunity to laugh, learn ... my children are deprived of the right to rejoice, to love, the right to breathe, the right to life?

 Why?  My dear, WHY?

 Why are my little birds, my doves, brutally killed, torn to pieces of their bodies, their hearts?

 Who gives such orders?!

 What animal has no heart, no common sense?!  Why is he not afraid of mother's tears or curses?!  Why decides the fate of many people?!

 Ask my dear!

 Who needs such integrity of the state?  A power that sends its sons to war to fight their brothers.   The man sitting next to him, pointing at the shells prepared to kill the children of Donbass, is a fighter of the Azov group.