'It flew right into her room': 14-year-old Ukrainian girl killed by Russian drone as attacks surge

Maria Troyanivska had come home early the night a Russian drone hit her bedroom.

“It flew in through the window, right into her room,” her mother Viktoria tells the BBC. After the explosion, she and her husband Volodymyr ran from the next room to find their daughter’s room on fire.

“We tried to put it out, but everything was burning so strongly,” she says through tears. “It was impossible to breathe – we had to leave.”

The Russian Shahed drone killed the 14-year-old in her bed, in her suburban apartment in Kyiv, last month.

“She died immediately, and then burned,” her mother said. “We had to bury her in a closed coffin. She had no chance of surviving.” BBC/Kamil Dayan Khan Maria's bedroom in suburban Kyiv