Sawt Falasteen - Ukraine war widow buries her daughters killed by Russia

Either her 12- and 17-year-old were trapped alive beneath the mound of rubble that was once their nine-storey housing bloc in the leafy neighbourhood of the Ukrainian capital.

Or her daughters were dead, and already with their father, who volunteered to fight when Russian forces invaded Ukraine and was killed in combat three years earlier.

"It's so painful -- these words won't mean anything to you until you feel it yourself," she told a local television crew in shock at the strike site during the hours-long rescue operation and painful wait for answers.

Five days later, on Tuesday, Yakovlieva hunched ashen-faced and gently rocking back and forth before her daughters' closed coffins under the golden domes of Saint Michael's church in Kyiv, as an Orthodox priest intoned their funeral mass.

- 'Pain of loss' -

"No words of compassion can ease this pain of loss, this burden of great suffering, when one must bury young people," the priest told black-clothed mourners, weeping or clutching flowers and holding each other.

"This is a tragedy not only for your family, it is a tragedy for our entire Ukrainian state today."

Air raid sirens warning against the threat of a Russian attack echoed out during the funeral service for Vira, 12 -- whose body was pulled from the rubble first -- and Liubava, 17.

The girls were among two dozen killed in the early hours of Thursday when Russia launched its deadliest attack of the year on the capital, with 675 combat drones and 56 missiles.

Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said it was likely a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile that exploded into the bottom floor of the girls' home, buckling the foundations and collapsing one floor on top of the next.

Each projectile carries a price tag of around $1.2 million, Ukrainian defence analysts estimate.

AFP journalists at the strike site saw emergency service workers hauling those killed and wounded from the scene on stretchers while bystanders, including the sisters' classmates, speculated who the victim could be.

"It's hard to say anything when children are killed. Especially children when they were sleeping. It's barbarity," Natalia, whose son was killed alongside the girls' father told AFP at the funeral in Kyiv.

Olga, another mourner who taught the younger daughter to draw, said both sisters were talented and outgoing, and described their death as an "inexpressible pain".

- Rising infant toll -

Hours after the strikes, President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that Russia "deliberately destroys lives" and pleaded with allies to step up pressure on Moscow to end its war.

"It is Ukraine that is defending Europe and the world so that such strikes, in which children are killed, do not spread further," he added.

The Kremlin said its forces had struck Ukrainian military facilities. It denies the Russian army targets civilians.

But the girls are now among at least 704 Ukrainian children have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Thousands more have been wounded or are missing, police say.

Before processing to the cemetery, the priest asked the mourners to believe that the girls -- whose names translate to "faith" and "love" -- were now in a better place and with God.

"In a place where there is no war, no pain, no grief, no suffering, no sighing, but eternal blessed life."

Z.AbuSaud--SF-PST