When emergency workers arrived at the home of Tetyana Kulyk and her husband Pavlo Ivanchov shortly after it was hit by a Russian drone on Wednesday, all they could do was recover their charred bodies.
Kulyk, a renowned Ukrainian journalist, and Ivanchov, a surgeon and university professor, were killed when the drone hit their home just north of Kyiv.
Neighbors told Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne they heard screams and tried to enter the burning home through the garage, only to discover the whole house had turned into an impassable inferno.
As US President Donald Trump pushes for “a deal” to end the war in Ukraine – and dresses down Ukraine’s president in front of reporters at the White House – Moscow every day keeps launching deadly attacks against Ukraine.
Kulyk and Ivanchov are just two of the more than 75 Ukrainian civilians who have been killed by Russia since Trump held what he called a “highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin less than three weeks ago.
Trump said that he was convinced after the call that the Russian leader wants to end the war. “I think he wants to stop fighting. I see that. We spoke long and hard,” the US president said.
Trump berated Zelensky for allegedly not wanting to engage in diplomacy with Putin, who has repeatedly violated earlier agreements, launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and is overseeing the killing of Ukrainian civilians on daily basis.
Speaking in front of the cameras on Friday, Trump criticized Zelensky for “the hatred he’s got for Putin” and accused him of not wanting a peace, a suggestion Zelensky rejected.
And meanwhile the fighting is continuing – and the civilian death toll is mounting in Ukraine.
Russia has consistently denied targeting civilian infrastructure, despite the ample evidence, and has pointed to the deaths on its own territory from Ukrainian attacks.
Among those killed in Ukraine in recent weeks was Olga Moroz, a baker born in 1968, who died when a Russian rocket hit the yard of her home in Kramatorsk. Local media quoted her friends as saying she was a hard worker who was always cheerful and was taking care of her elderly mother.
A Russian missile hit a building in Kryvyi Rih, crushing 21-year-old Vladimir Pimenov. Local media said the man, a talented dancer, died in hospital. Pimenov’s girlfriend was critically injured in the strike and remains in hospital, the report said.
In the town of Bilytske, in the Donetsk region, a Russian strike on a residential building killed Yevhen and Olga Buryane, young parents of two children. Local volunteers have organized a fundraiser in support of the orphans.
Several Ukrainian civilians were killed on Friday, as Trump and Zelensky were preparing for and held their disastrous meeting at the White House.
A civilian passenger was killed when a Russian drone hit a minibus in Kherson, according to the Ukrainian prosecutors, while two civilian men in their early 60s were killed by Russian drones cycling through the town on Lyman in eastern Ukraine.
Over the weekend, at least seven more Ukrainian civilians, including a teenager, were killed in Russian attacks.
Putin demands more of Ukraine’s territory
Trump sent a delegation of American diplomats earlier this month to meet their Russian counterparts for peace talks in Saudi Arabia. Ukraine was not invited to the summit.
The meeting lasted more than four hours and was described by a member of Moscow’s negotiating team as “positive.”
And while Trump seemed to suggest Putin is ready to negotiate, the Russian leader has been busy reiterating demands that have long been unacceptable to Kyiv.
Putin has repeatedly made his goals clear: He wants to gain control over the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as hold onto the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, Russia currently occupies about 99% of the Luhansk region, 70% of the Donetsk region, and roughly 75% of both the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Trump and his officials have said that it is unlikely Ukraine will be able to get back much of its pre-war territory, with the president even going as far as suggesting that Ukraine “may be Russian someday.”
According to Ukrainian officials, some 6 million people, including 1 million children, live under Russian occupation, in what the United Nations has described as a “bleak human rights situation.”
But Russian troops are inching ahead in a number of locations along the frontline, slowly taking over more and more of Ukraine’s territory.
The eastern cities of Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk saw numerous attacks in recent days, with nine people killed in Kostyantynivka and three in Pokrovsk in the past week, Ukrainian officials said.
But while many of the attacks have targeted cities and towns in eastern parts of the country, the last three weeks have shown that nowhere is safe in Ukraine.
The Russian military even fired missiles at Kyiv, on the very day Trump and Putin were speaking, killing one person and injuring a child. It regularly launches deadly attacks against civilians in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, as well as Kherson in the south.
As the news of their killing broke on Wednesday, Kulyk and Ivanchov were hailed by their friends and colleagues, with many highlighting their respective achievements.
Serhiy Cherevaty, the director general of Ukrinform, the Ukrainian National News Agency, where Kulyk worked, praised her work on programs focused on Ukraine’s soldiers.
“She will forever remain in our hearts and in our memory,” he said in a statement.
“Tetiana was not just a professional in her field; she was a voice that told the world about the resilience of the Ukrainian people,” said Serhiy Tomilenko, the president of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine.
The Bogomolets National Medical University where Ivanchov worked said he “didn’t just operate, he organized the entire healing process – from admission to discharge from hospital, he passed his knowledge on to students and colleagues and was a role model to students who aspire to become qualified doctors and responsible citizens.”
Ivanchov, it added, “was the person who made the university into what it is today.”