On Tuesday, St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv held a funeral for two young sisters, Liubava Yakovlieva, 12, and Vira Yakovlieva, 17, who were killed in a Russian missile strike on May 14. The missile tore through their apartment building, killing 24 people.
The girls' mother, Tetiana, sat beside the white coffins, the sole surviving member of the family. Their father, Yevhen, a soldier, was killed on the front line three years ago.
Dozens of children, including classmates of the sisters, dressed in black, came to say goodbye. Buckets at the foot of the coffins overflowed with flowers, and bouquets lay across the floor. Photographs on the coffins showed the blond Liubava and Vira, wearing glasses.
Adults and children wept. Among the mourners stood several of Yevhen Yakovliev's fellow soldiers. Before the war, he was known as a talented cook, fisherman, and handyman. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he enlisted and was killed in action on April 7, 2023, near Dibrova in the Luhansk region.
After the Russian missile struck, footage captured by Current Time, a Radio Liberty project, showed the girls' mother speaking as rescuers searched the debris. "I lost their father, my husband, a defender of Ukraine. I don't know if they are alive or if they have already gone to be with their father," Tetiana said. "That it is very painful — those words will tell you nothing until you feel it yourself."
Dmytro Koval, who taught Vira painting and drawing at a Kyiv art college, described her as strong-willed, unafraid to speak her mind, but kind and attentive. He said the shock of her death was profound. "When death is sown among those you saw and knew just yesterday, it is always very hard, unspeakably hard," Koval said. "We must not live on illusions, on empty dreams, on hopes for some negotiations, because our neighbors are not oriented toward peace."
Liubava was remembered by family friend Tetiana Osipova as small and seemingly fragile but inwardly strong. Osipova, who served alongside the girls' father and accompanied his body home, said the children had a hard time coping with the loss of their father. On the day rescuers searched the rubble for Liubava and Vira, she stood beside their mother. Now, Osipova said, Tetiana faced a new kind of grief — no longer a wife, no longer a mother — but was determined to carry forward the memory of her children and husband.
"This is an unnatural order of things, when parents bury their children," said Efrem Khomiak, the priest presiding over the service. "This funeral, this grief, this tragedy, it is not only your family's. It belongs to all of Ukraine. Because we are all bound together in this war."
