Anastasiia Yalanskaya, a young volunteer in Ukraine, has been shot and killed while delivering food to a dog shelter in Bucha, 30 kilometers outside Kyiv, on Friday.
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As Russian troops closed in on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, Anastasiia Yalanskaya insisted she would stay, even while her friends and family fled around her.
The dog shelter in Bucha had been without supplies for three days. The town has been devastated by Russian bombardment. It is part of the line of Ukrainian defense as Russian troops make their push to Kyiv.
The 26-year-old Ukrainian woman was killed alongside two men she had been volunteering with.
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Yalanskaya’s friends and family say her car was deliberately targeted at close-range by Russian troops.
Friends do not know why she was targeted, but believe Russian troops are increasingly killing civilians at random as a way to scare the population into submission.
Ukrainians resist as Russia hammers major cities
“I asked her to be extra cautious. That nowadays, a mistake costs extremely much,” her husband Yevhen Yalanskyi says.
“But she was helping everyone around. I asked her to think of evacuation but she did not listen.”
Despite denials from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is mounting – though the total number remains unclear.
As of March 1, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it has recorded 752 civilian casualties. The next day, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said 2,000 civilians had been killed.
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