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The Ukrainian mother killed alongside her two children in a Kyiv suburb on Sunday has been identified as Tatiana Perebeynos — an IT worker who didn’t flee sooner because she was caring for her ailing mother.
Perebeynos, 43, her two children Alise, 9, and Nikita, 18, and a man they were traveling with were killed when Russian forces indiscriminately fired at them as they were fleeing Irpin.
The image of the family lying dead on the pavement caught the world’s attention, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to hunt down and kill “every bastard” responsible for their deaths.
Andriy Dubcha, a Ukrainian journalist who first published the devastating footage of the shelling that killed the family, said Monday that Perebeinis was from Donetsk and fled to Irpin in 2014 when war broke out in the eastern region.
“Thought Irpin was a safe place. But the Russian army found them here too,” he wrote on Facebook.
Dubcha identified the man who died alongside them as Anatoly, a 28-year-old from Lugansk, but his exact relationship to the family remains unknown.
The mom and her two kids are survived by her husband, who was still in Donetsk when they died and is trying to make his way to Kyiv to bury his family, he added.
Sergey Perebeinis, who has been identified in media reports as the surviving husband, posted pictures of his family on Facebook, writing, “He took them all. Tanya couldn’t make it. What is this all me for? What’s next? I’m on my way…I must see you one last time. Forgive me, I didn’t cover you.”
The heartbroken husband also posted about the family’s two small dogs he has been trying to track down, saying one was found in a local clinic with an amputated leg. He later posted about one of his dogs dying, saying, “Unfortunately, my good friend flew to them now.”
Mikita Mikado, an investor in the Palo Alto, Calif., online-marketing startup SE Ranking where Perebeynos worked, posted the image of Perebeinis and her children on Facebook on Sunday and confirmed her death.
“Unfortunately, her family could not leave Irpen earlier because of her sick mother,” he wrote in a post commemorating his co-worker and urging his followers to donate to recovery efforts in Ukraine.
“We are devastated to say that yesterday our dear colleague and friend Tatiana Perebeinis, the chief accountant of SE Ranking, was killed together with her two kids by russian mortar artillery,” SE Ranking wrote Monday on Facebook.
“There are no words to describe our grief or to mend our pain. But for us, it is crucial to not let Tania and her kids Alise and Nikita remain just statistics. Her family became the victim of the unprovoked fire on civilians, which under any law is a crime against humanity,” it continued.
“The Russian army are criminals, and they should be stopped. Our hearts are broken. Our prayers are for all Ukrainians, who are fighting for their right to exist.”
Zelensky spoke about Perebeynos and her two children in an address Sunday.
“We will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war. On our land. We will find every bastard. Which shot at our cities, our people. Which bombed our land. Which launched rockets. Which gave the order and pressed ‘start,’” he continued. “There will be no quiet place on this Earth for you. Except for the grave.”
