Six-year-old Oleg Kornievski smiling for his mother with a bouquet of freshly gathered flowers should have been a priceless family photograph.
However, the image serves as a horrible foreshadowing of yet another heartbreaking narrative from Ukraine’s war.
Oleg was killed in a Russian artillery bombardment few hours later. His mother Ekaterina buried him the next day after he was mortally injured by shrapnel in front of his house. The bereaved mother was spotted sobbing as she knelt on the ground to pray, tending to the earth on his burial.
When Russian forces shelled Lysychansk, a city in eastern Ukraine directly over the river from the battleground of Severodonetsk, three people were murdered.
At least one additional person sustained injuries. According to Serhiy Haidai, the chairman of the Luhansk region, this week’s attacks on the area resulted in the burning of a commercial center.
Ekaterina, pictured tending to her son’s grave, buried her son the following day.
Four residences and the buildings of a local mine were also damaged, while 11 houses were wrecked in the Vrubivka area and a nursery school was struck in Hirske.
According to UN data, 277 children have died and 456 have been injured throughout the fighting, however Ukraine puts the death toll at 313.
In recent weeks, Lysychansk has been subjected to constant shelling, while Severodonetsk, on the opposite side of the Siverskyi Donets river, has witnessed some of the most severe street combat since Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine.
According to Mr Haidai, an air strike damaged a building sheltering civilians in Lysychansk on Thursday, killing at least four people and injuring seven more.
He further claimed that a separate air strike had damaged a municipal sanatorium, causing it to collapse and likely resulting in more casualties.
‘It is likely that there are people trapped under the rubble,’ he said of the second strike, with a rescue team under way.