- September 13, 2026
- 12:22 pm
- World News
On September 7, 2026, little Ukrainian Nazar turned 1 year old. At this age, parents usually argue about which cake to order, try to capture the child on camera, and then keep funny photos from the first birthday for years. Nazar’s first photos are completely different: a tiny body among tubes, sensors, and medical equipment, resuscitation, and doctors who literally kept him alive for several months.
Author: Elena Gunko
He was not supposed to be born on September 7, 2025. Doctors expected him around October 20, but around three in the morning, a Russian Shahed struck the house in Kyiv where his family lived. A few hours later, doctors performed an emergency cesarean section on his severely burned mother, and Nazar was born almost a month and a half prematurely. The story was reminded by UNITED24.
His mother could never hold her son in her arms again.
Three in the morning. Corridor. Explosion
24-year-old Tatyana Sakiyan was 34 weeks pregnant. She lived in a two-room apartment on Yakuba Kolasa Street in the Svyatoshyn district of Kyiv with her common-law husband Vadim Bogdan and younger sister Alina. The family came from the Kirovohrad region, Tatyana and Vadim worked, rented housing, and prepared for the birth of their son.
The things bought for the child were already at home. Ahead was supposed to be the most ordinary life of a young family: maternity hospital, sleepless nights, diapers, walks with a stroller, the first tooth, the first steps. The Russian war left them with a completely different calendar.
During air raids, the family usually left the rooms for the corridor, and if the attack became especially strong, they hid in the bathroom. That night they heard a drone very close. Tatyana was closing the door when the explosion thundered.
People were thrown in different directions, the door fell on Tatyana, and her clothes caught fire. Vadim later said that at first, he almost didn’t feel his own burns—the shock was so strong that he thought primarily about Tatyana. Alina was in another room and was practically unharmed, and somehow they managed to descend from the fifth floor on their own.
Vadim had burns on about 85% of his body. Tatyana received burns on more than 90% of her body surface, and inside her was still a child who had about a month and a half left before birth.
At 08:45, doctors were already saving two
Tatyana was taken to the hospital, and the doctors quickly realized that waiting for natural childbirth was impossible. The woman’s body was severely damaged by burns and the consequences of the explosion, the child experienced severe stress, smoke, and trauma with her. It was no longer about the pregnancy term, but whether the doctors would have time to save the baby.
On September 7, 2025, at 08:45, Nazar was born. He weighed about 2250 grams, was born at 34 weeks of pregnancy, and immediately ended up in intensive care. Tatyana had chosen the name for her son in advance—she wanted to name him Nazar, and her relatives fulfilled her wish.
The boy’s condition was extremely serious. He was breathing poorly, his body couldn’t maintain blood pressure, coagulation disorders and infections appeared. Then the doctors discovered a brain hemorrhage, after which hydrocephalus began to develop—fluid accumulated inside the skull and increased pressure on the brain.
While other newborns lay on their mother’s chest, getting used to her voice not through the womb, Nazar lay under machines. His mother was in another ward at that time, fighting for her life.
Four operations in the first months
In the first incomplete three months, Nazar underwent four surgical interventions, three of them on the brain. Doctors installed special systems to drain fluid and tried to stop the consequences of a severe hemorrhage.
He didn’t have the usual first month at home, a crib next to his parents, or the first family walks. Instead, there were neurosurgeons, shunts, antibiotics, equipment, and the constant question: how serious would the consequences be for the child’s development.
The family was helped by the charitable organization “Mama i nemovlya”. It participated in providing the necessary neurosurgical materials and further treatment of the baby. Only a year passed between Nazar’s photos from intensive care and the pictures from his first birthday, although the amount of experience makes this distance much greater.
The last meeting of Tatyana and Vadim
Vadim was also in the hospital after the strike. In addition to burns on about 85% of his body, he suffered a severe concussion and significantly lost his hearing.
When his condition stabilized a little, Vadim was brought to Tatyana in a wheelchair. She was almost completely bandaged and tried to say something to him, but after the explosion, the man almost couldn’t hear and couldn’t make out her words.
This was their last meeting. Vadim later couldn’t remember and reconstruct what the woman, with whom he was expecting a child and planning to build a family, said to him.
Mom saw Nazar only on the phone
Tatyana was shown a photo of her son on a phone screen. This is how she first saw the child she carried for eight months: she didn’t hold him, didn’t hug him, didn’t look into his eyes—she saw a picture.
She was told that the boy was named Nazar, as she wanted. This detail was preserved thanks to the stories of relatives and makes the story almost physically heavy: the mother knew her son was alive, knew his name, saw his face, but the walls of the hospital remained between them.
On September 21, Tatyana unexpectedly felt a little better. She talked, asked for homemade food, and for the first time in two weeks, relatives allowed themselves to hope that the worst might be over.
The next day it all ended.
On the evening of September 22, 2025, Tatyana Sakiyan died. She was 24 years old. After the birth of her son, she lived for 15 days, and the doctors didn’t let Vadim go to the funeral—his own condition remained too severe.
Even the things parents prepared for their son burned
The strike destroyed not only the housing. The things bought for the child, phones, and part of the family photos burned in the apartment—that domestic past, which almost no one considers valuable until one day it disappears.
After Tatyana’s death, relatives had to collect her photos from other people’s phones and archives. When Nazar grows up and asks what his mother was like, he will be shown the little that was preserved by other people.
In one photo, she is young and smiling. In another, perhaps still pregnant. It is from such disparate pictures that the boy will one day have to piece together the image of the woman who chose his name but couldn’t hold him.
NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency
The father was alive, but first, he had to prove he was the father
After Tatyana’s death, another story arose, not medical, but bureaucratic. Tatyana and Vadim lived together and were expecting a child, but they didn’t have time to officially register their marriage, so legally Vadim was initially not recorded as Nazar’s father.
It turned into an almost absurd situation: the biological father is alive, lying in the hospital with severe burns, and his newborn son is officially an orphan under state guardianship. Vadim had to undergo a DNA test and then establish paternity through legal procedures.
He did this simultaneously with treating burns, the consequences of a concussion, hearing problems, and panic states. The state had to document what was never a question for the family: Nazar is his son.
In December, Nazar finally left the hospital
The boy spent almost three months under constant medical supervision. Only in December 2025 was he discharged, and Vadim’s sister Oksana, who became the child’s guardian, took him to her home in Ivano-Frankivsk.
There, Nazar first had a life somewhat resembling ordinary childhood: home, toys, another child nearby, walks, a pool. Oksana told journalists that after the hospital, the boy gradually began to come to life—showing interest in toys, cooing, responding more attentively to people.
But the hospital didn’t disappear from his life. After the brain hemorrhage and three neurosurgical operations, Nazar required regular examinations, so the family traveled with him from Ivano-Frankivsk to Kyiv.
Oksana started photographing her nephew every month. She wants his childhood album to consist not only of pictures from intensive care, tubes, and hospital wards.
Now let’s still find those very “Nazis”
Russia explains the war against Ukraine as a necessity for “denazification.” Putin uttered this word on February 24, 2022, and then repeatedly returned to it, justifying the invasion, occupation of Ukrainian territories, and continuation of the war.
Around this topic, long historical debates can be held—about nationalism, crimes of the Holocaust period, Soviet historiography, collaborationism, modern Ukraine, and manipulations of historical memory. But these conversations cannot replace the specific events of today’s war.
Therefore, it’s better to return to the two-room apartment on Yakuba Kolasa Street.
Who exactly needed to be “denazified” there? 24-year-old Tatyana, closing the door in the corridor during an air raid? Her unborn son? Vadim, who ended up with burns on most of his body after the Russian strike and couldn’t hear the last words of his beloved woman?
Or 18-year-old Alina, who ran out of the destroyed apartment at night with her burned sister?
The Russian construction of “Nazis” especially quickly falls apart when instead of a map of Ukraine, a specific name appears. Here it is: Tatyana Sakiyan, 24 years old, died from burns received after the Russian strike.
And who behaves like a fascist here
The word “fascism” is too serious to use simply as an insult. You can’t declare every Russian a fascist just by passport and can’t replace the analysis of the regime with a person’s nationality.
But you can look at the actions of the state. When political power claims that a neighboring people doesn’t have the full right to independently determine its future, declares its statehood a historical mistake, invades its territory, annexes lands, and justifies all this with some higher historical mission, the question ceases to be purely terminological.
Especially when the war is waged under the slogan of fighting “fascists.”
The history of the 20th century knows well the mechanism by which the enemy is first declared absolute evil, and then violence against them becomes almost automatically permissible. In modern Russian propaganda, a “Nazi” can become a Ukrainian serviceman, a Jewish president, a volunteer, a journalist, or just a person who considers Ukraine an independent country.
After that, it remains only to hide the consequences behind a military report. But in Tatyana and Vadim’s apartment, the result of Russian “denazification” cannot be hidden: a deceased young mother, a severely burned father, and a premature child who underwent four operations in the first months of life.
Israelis no longer need an explanation for the word Shahed
For the Israeli reader, Shahed has long ceased to be a weapon from a distant Ukrainian war. Israel has seen Iranian strike drones in its own sky and knows what long hours of alarms look like when drones and missiles come in waves.
In Ukraine, this sound has been heard for years. Iranian technology has become the basis for an entire Russian family of strike devices, launched by the dozens and hundreds, mixed with false targets and missiles, and designed not only to hit the target but also to overload air defense.
The night of September 7, 2025, became one of the largest such raids. According to the final data of the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia used 823 air attack means: 810 strike UAVs and decoy drones, nine Iskander-K cruise missiles, and four Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles.
Ukrainian air defense shot down or suppressed 751 targets, but the remaining ones broke through. In Kyiv, residential buildings were destroyed and damaged, people died, including a woman with a two-month-old child, apartments burned, and a fire broke out in the Cabinet of Ministers building.
NAnews detailed the massive Russian attack on September 7, 2025, and its consequences for Kyiv. At that time, the numbers were still being clarified during the rescue operation, but it was already clear: this was not just another “night alarm,” but one of the largest air strikes of the war.
The apartment of Nazar’s family was just one human story within this huge statistic. We cannot claim without evidence that Russian military deliberately chose this apartment as a target, but the result of the strike is known for sure: a pregnant woman received fatal burns, her child had to be saved by emergency cesarean section, and the father ended up in the burn unit.
A year later, Russian attacks have not disappeared
It would be convenient to end with words that Nazar survived and life prevailed. But the war didn’t end there, and while the child learned to hold his head, coo, and reach for toys, Russian missiles and drones continued to fly to Ukraine.
In September 2026, Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities again experienced massive attacks. People died, residential buildings were destroyed, shops, post offices, and railway infrastructure were damaged.
NAnews reported on a new massive Russian attack in September 2026—after negotiations and another round of talks about a possible end to the war. For Nazar’s family, such news sounds different than for the average reader: they already know that one night can divide life into “before” and “after.”
Israel helps to gather people after the war breaks them
There is another connection to Israel in this story. While Iranian technologies in Russian hands are used for strikes on Ukraine, Israeli specialists are passing on their experience in treating the physical and psychological consequences of war to Ukrainians.
Burns, amputations, post-traumatic disorders, rehabilitation of military and civilians—all this Israel knows too well. By 2026, dozens of Ukrainian specialists had already undergone relevant training with the participation of Israeli organizations.
Behind such a dry number, it’s easy to lose the meaning. Nazar’s story brings it back: after the arrival of Shahed, the work doesn’t end when firefighters put out the fire. First, the surgeon saves the body, then the neurosurgeon fights for the brain, then the rehabilitation specialist helps the child catch up with development, and the psychologist works with the father who remembers the burning woman and doesn’t know what she said to him the last time.
The war remains inside the family much longer than the smoke lingers over the destroyed house.
Nazar turned one year old
Now Nazar is nothing like that tiny baby from intensive care. He grows, shows interest in toys, looks into the camera, and is surrounded by people who did everything possible to give him a home and childhood after that night.
Someday he will be told the whole story. That his mother was eagerly waiting for him, chose his name herself, and managed to see his photo. That doctors saved him in the morning after the Russian strike, and then took him to the operating room four times and returned him to his family four times.
He will be told that his father survived, although he was almost completely burned. That his aunt took him home. That there were many people around who cared.
But they will also have to tell him why his mother could only see him on a phone screen, why his father didn’t hear her last words, and why the very first months of his life were spent between intensive care and neurosurgery.
Russia launches hundreds of drones and missiles at Ukraine. In Russian state rhetoric, this war is still called a fight for “denazification.”
In the life of one family, it looks simpler and scarier: A 24-year-old woman died, her man received burns on most of his body, and their son was born prematurely and started life with four operations.
Now Nazar is one year old. And we want to wish him the most ordinary fate—the one that seems self-evident for most children.
So that one day the main event of September 7 for him is only his birthday. So that adults argue about the cake, someone forgets to buy candles and has to run to the store, and the photos finally become just family photos.
Without intensive care.
Without Shahed.
Without the need to explain to the child why his mother first saw him only on a phone screen.