Iliya was playing football on the streets of Mariupol with his two friends.
Seconds later, the 16-year-old was dead.
In an image that broke hearts around the world, the teenager’s father Serhii wept at the side of his son’s corpse draped in a blood-stained sheet.
As he cradled his blond-haired boy, he sobbed uncontrollably in the shelled and bullet-ridden hospital. ‘My little son,’ he cried.
It is just the latest in a series of shocking images to emerge from the bloody warzone in Ukraine where Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion has cost the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.
Serhii, father of teenager Iliya, cries over his son’s lifeless body lying on a stretcher at a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine
The deputy mayor of Mariupol reported: ‘Residential areas heavily bombed. The situation is awful, we are near to a humanitarian catastrophe. We have been under more than 15 hours of continuous shelling without pause’
Iliya was struck while playing on a football pitch near their school in the Azov Sea city on Thursday.
His friends avid and Artyom were found with their legs riddled with shrapnel and now face the prospect of amputations.
The trio were rushed to the nearest hospital in the back of the car but Iliya was pronounced dead on arrival.
The surgeons leaving the operating room struggled to make eye contact with Serhii after the tragedy.
One held up his hands while the other looked down defeated as the father waiting at the doorway started to wail before dropping to the floor.
Mariupol – a key Russian target because of its port and location on the Sea of Azov – remained surrounded by Russian troops last night
Evgeniy Maloletka, the Associated Press photographer who took the tragic image, told The Telegraph: ‘The car pulled to the hospital. They opened the back and there were two teenagers.
‘One had his legs riddled with bullets, looking like raw meat. Iliya. He was already dead.
‘Artyom sat behind him. He was conscious. They were rushed to an ICU. Iliya was dead on arrival. They just left him there.’
He added: ‘Artyom and David had their legs riddled by bullets. This is a typical injury we see here. People with those injuries get their legs amputated. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them.
‘The hospital they were taken to was shelled by a Grad multi-rocket system. Nearby houses were shelled. People in that hospital often had to be laid on the floor.’
Hundreds are feared dead in the battle and a local official accused the Russians of wanting to wipe the city off the face of the earth
Families now face food shortages following five days of constant shelling while they have shivered in dark homes, left without electricity and heat
Mariupol – a key Russian target because of its port and location on the Sea of Azov – remained surrounded by Russian troops last night and under a barrage of shellfire which has destroyed properties and cut off power and water supplies.
Hundreds are feared dead in the battle and a local official accused the Russians of wanting to wipe the city off the face of the earth.
Its seizure would allow Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine to join forces with soldiers in Crimea – the peninsula forcibly annexed by Russia in 2014.
Families now face food shortages following five days of constant shelling while they have shivered in dark homes, left without electricity and heat.
Mariupol’s mayor Vadym Boichenko today described the attack on his city as a ‘full-scale genocide of the Ukrainian people.’
Russia is continuing to advance in southern Ukraine, with Mariupol under bombardment and Odessa and Mykolaiv under threat. Chernihiv, in the north, and Kharkiv, in the east, continue to come under heavy bombardment. The capital Kyiv is also under threat, though Ukrainian counter-attacks took out some Russian forces early on Friday
Without power lines, medics tending to the wounded were unclear as to where to take them.
It comes as Russian troops have seized Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after a firefight that set part of the complex ablaze.
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Putin of resorting to ‘nuclear terror’ and risking a catastrophe ‘six times worse than Chernobyl’ that would affect the whole continent.
Russian troops attacked the Zaporizhzhia plant in the early hours of Friday, with CCTV capturing a fierce gun battle between Putin’s men and Ukrainian defenders.
It sparked a fire in a six-storey training building just outside the main complex.
Moscow’s men then stopped firefighters getting to the building for several hours as fighting raged.
Eventually, emergency crews were allowed to go in and douse the flames before Russian troops moved in an occupied the site, which provides a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.
The UN’s nuclear monitoring agency said that, fortunately, none of the site’s six reactors had been directly damaged and radiation levels remained normal.
