The body of a ten-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble in front of his devastated father after Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.
Still wearing his Spider-Man pyjamas, Tymofiy was carried from the remains of his home after two Iskander ballistic missiles struck a residential buildings in the early hours of this morning.
His 68-year-old grandmother was also killed in the strike, officials said.
The little boy’s father, Oleh Bychko, watched in grief as rescuers placed his son’s small frame into a large black body bag.
MailOnline has chosen to run these picture of Tymofiy’s body to show the reality of Vladimir Putin’s war and the horrors his troops are inflicting on innocent civilians.
Oleh, his face scratched and his clothes covered in blood, said he had managed to pull his younger son and wife from the rubble after the devastating strike destroyed their residential building – but he couldn’t reach Tymofiy.
Another 28 people, including an 11-month-old baby, were injured in the attack which left a crater in the street just metres away from the apartment building.
It came just one day after 51 people perished in one of the most lethal missile strikes on Ukraine since Putin invaded on February 24, 2022.
That attack targeted a cafe in the village of Groza, where around 60 mourners, including children, had gathered for a wake of a fallen Ukrainian soldier.
Tymofiy, still wearing his Spiderman pyjamas from the night before, was carefully pulled from the rubble by emergency crews
The little boy’s father, Oleh Bychko, watches in grief as the rescuers place his son’s small frame into the large black body bag
Mr Bychko looks at the remains of a residential building in Kharkiv, which was damaged by a Russian missile strike
Just 330 people were recorded living in the village prior to the strike, meaning the Russian rocket attack effectively wiped out around a sixth of the population.
While the devastation unfolded in Ukraine, Putin boasted of Russia‘s nuclear power at a meeting in Sochi. He announced his military scientists had completed work on the Sarmat 2 – or ‘Satan’ – intercontinental ballistic missile and threatened to pull out of the nuclear test ban treaty.
Following today’s attack, rescue teams worked among the rubble of bricks, twisted metal and wood, to retrieve the body of little Tymofiy as his grief-stricken father stood in horror.
The explosion ripped through the apartment block, with debris littering the street below. Surrounding buildings were blackened by the blast, which shattered windows and damaged parked cars.
Neighbour Yevhen Shevchenko said he was in bed when the attack occurred. ‘There was a blast wave, a powerful explosion. It blew out the windows and doors in the apartment,’ he said.
A woman breaks down in tears after the Russian rocket attack struck the residential building in Kharkiv
Emergency workers search for victims after a Russian rocket hit an apartment building in central Kharkiv on Friday
Smoke rises from the ruins of a multi-storey building after a devastating Russian missile strike in the early hours of this morning
Pictured: The destroyed apartment building where ten-year-old boy Tymofiy Bychko was killed
Injured civilians look on in horror at the destroyed apartment building
Rescuers work at the site of a rocket attack on Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine, on Friday
A rescuer moves a fragment of a missile from a crater in the street
Burned out cars and debris litter the streets after the blast
Rescuers search for bodies after the rocket attack which injured 23 people including an 11-month-old baby
The attack left a crater in the street just metres away from the apartment building
A man, with blood pouring down his face, watches as emergency teams search for survivors
A couple hold each other after the Russian rocket attack struck Kharkiv on Friday
Rescuers sift through the wreckage after the Iskander ballistic missiles strike
In yesterday’s rocket attack, a crowded cafe and grocery store in the village of Hroza, near Kharkiv, was razed.
Devastating pictures of the aftermath showed blackened and dismembered bodies littering the ground opposite the ruins of the café.
Police and soldiers loaded white body bags onto trucks that would take them to Kharkiv for DNA testing.
‘My son was just found without a head, without arms, without legs, without anything. They recognised him from his documents,’ Volodymyr Mukhovaty, 70, told reporters.
His wife and daughter-in-law were also at the wake and he had ‘little hope’ of finding them alive.
‘I lived with my wife for 48 years,’ he said. ‘I will not last long alone.’
A six-year-old child was also among the victims.
The soldier whose wake it was had been killed a month after Russia invaded. He had been buried in the southern city of Dnipro – away from his home village, then under Russian occupation.
He was reburied in Groza on Thursday morning.
His wife and son, also a soldier, were both killed in the strike.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was attending a European summit in Spain at the time, said he had no doubt that the strike had been deliberate.
‘The Russian military could not fail to know where they were hitting,’ he said. ‘It was not a blind strike.’
‘The brutal Russian crime of hitting an ordinary grocery store with a rocket is a completely deliberate terrorist attack,’ Zelensky added.
Russian authorities have repeatedly insisted that their forces are only targeting strategic military locations and are not waging war on the civilian population of Ukraine.
But the reality of Putin’s war is different. The world has watched in horror as Putin’s soldiers have dropped missiles on grocery stores, railway stations and hospitals throughout the 18-month invasion.
Large swathes of the Kharkiv region, including Groza, were captured by Russian forces in the early days of the invasion last year.
Ukraine recaptured much of the border territory during a lightning offensive late last year, but the area has continued to come under regular shelling.
A woman collapses with grief as she kneels next to the bodies of Ukrainian civilians killed in the Russian strike on the grocery store on Thursday
Servicemen load one of the bodies onto a truck following the attack in Groza, which was the single most lethal missile strike on Ukraine
Rescuers search through the ruins of a cafe yesterday after the devastating strike which also killed a six-year-old child
Just 330 people were recorded living in the village of Groza prior to the strike, meaning the Russian rocket attack effectively wiped out around a sixth of the population
President Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the Groza attack had ‘no military logic’.
He said: ‘This is a reminder to anyone who is willing to smile and shake hands with war criminal Putin at international conferences.
‘A reminder to all those who want to sell something to Russia and return to bloody business as usual.
‘Putin’s Russia is a true evil’.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the ‘horrifying’ strike, saying ‘this is why we’re doing everything that we can to help Ukraine’.
Denise Brown, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, also called the attack ‘absolutely horrifying’ and said that ‘intentionally directing an attack against civilians or civilian objects is a war crime’.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had met with Mr Zelensky at the European Summit, said the strike ‘demonstrated the depths of depravity Russian forces are willing to sink to’.
It came as Putin warned his ‘Satan 2’ intercontinental ballistic missile, pictured during testing, were ready for deployment
He threatened the West with total nuclear destruction leaving ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia
Hours after the attack, Moscow said it had destroyed eight Ukrainian drones in western Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, but made no mention of any casualties.
Russia continued its attacks overnight elsewhere in Ukraine, targeting port infrastructure in the southern Izmail district, on the Danube river near the Romanian border.
Ukraine’s air force said it had downed 25 Russian attack drones in six regions, including Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Dnipro, but added that eight more slipped through and hit their targets.
Meanwhile in Sochi, the Russian president delivered a venomous speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, denouncing ‘threats’ from the West and vowing there would be ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia.
In an anti-US rant, the dictator said his powerful ‘Satan-2’ missiles are ready for deployment in an ominous doomsday warning.
Putin told the conference: ‘From the moment the launch of missiles is detected, no matter where it comes from – from any point of the world ocean or from any territory – such a number, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air in a retaliatory strike that there is no chance of survival there will be no single enemy left, and in several directions at once.’
The West has not threatened a first strike on Moscow and it is only his officials and an army of propagandists who have talked up the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.
Putin asked the West to understand that threats against Russia are ‘absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor’.
He said Russia had almost completed work on its nuclear-capable Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile system and successfully tested the nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik strategic cruise missile.
Russia has not conducted a test involving a nuclear explosion since 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Putin declined to rule out the possibility it could resume such testing.
He argued that the leaders of the West had lost ‘a sense of reality’ because of what he cast as Washington’s ‘colonial thinking’, and questioned what right the United States had to lecture any other country and argued that the nation considered itself the only arbiter of truth on the planet.
The Russian leader added that the conflict in Ukraine was ‘not a territorial’ one and that Moscow has ‘no interests from the point of view of conquering some territories’.
He claimed that Ukraine has lost more than 90,000 troops since the start of its counter-offensive in early June and also said that Kyiv has lost 557 tanks and around 1,900 armoured vehicles.