Husband of slain Ukrainian family says wife is still ‘lying on morgue floor’

A man whose family was killed in Ukraine in images that shocked the world has revealed his wife’s remains are still in a body bag at an overflowing morgue. WARNING: GRAPHIC

The grieving husband and father of the Ukrainian woman, two children, and the family’s two dogs, who were killed while trying to flee Kyiv earlier this week says his wife’s body is still lying in a body bag on the floor of an overflowing morgue.

Sergii Perebeinis arrived in Kyiv to bury his family but said their funerals had to be postponed because the morgues are full of civilian victims of the war.

He said the body of his wife, Tatiana Perebeinis, was “lying in a black bag on the floor” of a morgue, according to a report in the New York Post.

Sergii Perebeinis with his wife Tatiana who died in a Russian mortar attack in Ukraine. Picture: Facebook

Mr Perebeinis did not say where the remains of his children — Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9 — were.

“Trying to hold on but it’s really hard,” he said in a Facebook post.

The family were killed by Russian mortar fire as they tried to run across a damaged bridge in Irpin, just outside of Kyiv, on Sunday.

They died alongside another man, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, a church volunteer who was helping the to escape.

The harrowing images of their bodies strewn across the street with their suitcases and a dog carrier sparked outrage across the world.

Mr Perebeinis, who wasn’t with his family because he was caring for his sick mother in separatist-held eastern Ukraine, said their dogs also died in the attack.

Mykyta, 18, the son of Tatiana and Sergii Perebeinis, died. Picture: Facebook

Nine-year-old Alise was killed in the attack. Picture: Facebook

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Perebeinis said he learned of his family’s deaths on Twitter.

Mr Perebeinis said he knew the evacuation route they had planned to take after last speaking to his wife on Saturday night.

He said he had been trying to monitor his family’s location on a cellphone app.

Mr Perebeinis knew something had gone wrong when the tracker showed the phone was at a Kyiv hospital, and no one was picking up his calls.

Mr Perebeinis then saw a Twitter post of the scene after reading reports that a family had been killed by a mortar strike on the route they’d planned to take.

“I recognised the luggage and that is how I knew,” he said of the bloodstained suitcases and backpacks the family was carrying. The items were photographed next to their bodies.

Mr Perebeinis said he had since met with some witnesses who “handed me some of the personal items that were left lying on the street near the bodies”.

Tatiana Perebeinis was the chief accountant for SE Ranking, a Silicon Valley start-up with headquarters in London and a large workforce in Kyiv.

Despite being urged to leave Ukraine by her company, she didn’t leave sooner over concerns of how to bring her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

Tatiana’s mother and father were right behind the family when they were killed, but they were not harmed in the attack.

Mr Perebeinis wrote on Facebook that he was finally able to return to Kyiv after four days “on my feet, thousands of kilometres of road.”

Speaking of his journey, he told the New York Times that he had to fly into Russia from eastern Ukraine so he could cross the land border into Poland.

He said he was questioned by Russian soldiers at the Russia-Poland border and feared he was about to be arrested – but was ultimately allowed to continue on.

“My whole family died in what you call a special operation and we call a war,” Mr Perebeinis said he told them. “You can do what you want with me. I have nothing left to lose.’’

– with the New York Post