SLOVIANSK, Aug 08 (AFP): College sweethearts Mykyta and Sofia Lamekhov had simple dreams: safety for their family and a fresh start at life, away from the war they thought they had left behind in east Ukraine.
Mykyta, 23, and Sofia, 22, fled their front-line hometown of Sloviansk for the capital Kyiv, where they made a home for their two-year-old son Lev and the baby Sofia was expecting.
"Young people always have plans. It seems their whole life is ahead of them-they want more, anything can be overcome," Sofia's father Svyatoslav Gaponov told AFP.
Around three years after they fled the fighting, however, the war caught up with them.
Last week, a Russian missile tore through their nine-storey residential building. Attacks that night killed 32 people in Kyiv.
The hours-long barrage was one of the worst on Kyiv since Russia invaded in 2022, and served as a stark reminder of the dangers Ukrainians face even far from the front.
At their funeral in Sloviansk, Gaponov, a respected member of the protestant congregation, led the funeral with a steady voice as mourners sobbed.
Sofia's grandmother clasped her hands and wept silently during a slideshow of the couple holding a beaming Lev.
"They were young and we thought they'd be better off in Kyiv. It was quieter," said Gaponov, 45.
More than 422,700 people from across Ukraine have taken refuge in Kyiv.
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