Soldiers of the Rubizh Brigade's "Syla Svobody" battalion and the police "White Angel" evacuation unit pulled a nine-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister out of Dobropillia after a Russian drone killed their mother and father. The children had been sheltering in a basement with their grandmother, who contacted the police only after an acquaintance told her that her daughter and son-in-law were dead.
Dobropillia, in Donetsk Oblast, was placed under mandatory child evacuation in July 2025. On paper, no minors remained there as of May 2026. These two children lived in the gap between that paper status and an actual basement—surfacing through no registry, but because the adults hiding them had been killed on an open road in daylight, the Donetsk Oblast police reported.
The grandmother of the children called the police White Angel evacuation department and informed them about the situation. An acquaintance had reached her with the news. The parents' bodies stayed where they fell.
The family left Dobropillia for Zaporizhzhia Oblast in 2022, registered as displaced persons, then came back. After that, the children were, in all likelihood, kept out of sight.
"There are cases like this—parents, I don't know what to call them—they leave and register IDP status, and after that return to the city. They live in conditions where the children are in a basement. These are not isolated cases. We have seen it already from the occupied cities," Yudin said.
Driving into a city that is barely there
To reach the children, soldiers of the 4th "Syla Svobody" battalion of the National Guard's Rubizh Brigade drove an armored vehicle into a place where, by the unit's own account, there is almost nothing left to drive into. Remnants of buildings. Nothing intact to speak of. Every approach watched by Russian drones; anything that moves becomes a target.
"The first thought was to get the armored doors shut. That is the basics, because if a drone comes while you are still outside, you can survive. If it gets inside the armor, it is hard," he said. Once he started moving, he understood that getting everyone out alive was on him.
The drone that killed the parents, by the driver's account, locked onto movement. They were moving. They were hit at that moment. The strike came in broad daylight, on the road, with civilians plainly in view, ArmyInform reported.
What the soldiers found
The two servicemen sent to check the address found a girl and a boy with their grandmother, alone. They took them in, sheltered them, and began preparing the extraction. The children had gone a long time without proper food. The men fed them first.
"The boy is nine, around second or third grade. I think he has not even understood what school is. The girl is six—she never went at all. I would never have left children in conditions like that. I do not know how they lived there," one of the soldiers said.
To the children, leaving was framed as an adventure with grandma.
The grandmother went with them to a safer region. The soldiers' comrades managed to bring out the parents' bodies. The rescue was filmed and published by the Rubizh Brigade on 17 May.
Mandatory evacuation from Dobropillia began in July 2025. Officially, no children were left.
