Photo: Svitlana & Kristina | By Victor Sema, Anastasiia Parafeniuk, Yuliya Talmazan, Leila Sackur,Ostap Hunkevych, and Bianca Britton – NBC News / Yahoo | KYIV, Ukraine — They sang about love and loss, their lyrics reflecting the hopes and fears of their fellow Ukrainians as brutal battles raged a few miles from their home city of Zaporizhzhia in the country’s south.
Now their musical lament is playing at their own graves.
Street musicians Svitlana Siemieikina, 18, and Kristina Spitsyna, 21, were killed by a Russian airstrike on a residential area of Zaporizhzhia last week. Their deaths — and a video of them singing in the streets that was purportedly shot hours before the attack — prompted an outpouring of grief across social media in Ukraine, with thousands mourning the loss of two young lives.
From the graveyard where the budding artists were buried side by side on Friday, Svitlana’s father, Yuriy Siemieikin, told NBC News that the girls had bonded over music and formed their duo shortly after the start of the war in February 2022.
“See how they are looking at each other,” he said Saturday, pointing at the adjoining graves decked out in colorful wreaths and blue and yellow Ukrainian flags waving in the breeze above them.
Siemieikin, 41, said that the family had chosen not to play Svitlana and Kristina’s songs at the funeral, but that he had decided to play some of them through his car speakers when he returned to the burial site the following day. In a video he shared with NBC News, Kristina’s voice can be heard ringing across the cemetery.
“They had more than 200 songs that they could play and sing,” he said.
They were playing some of them on the day of their deaths, busking in central Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday.
Kristina’s mom, Halyna Spitsyna, said in a separate interview that the girls had left Svitlana’s boyfriend, Mykyta, to look after their equipment so they could go to a park. “At that very moment, those 2 minutes and those 300 meters became fatal for them,” she added.
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Read the rest of this sad story here:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-musicians-sang-streets-hours-164548166.html
Victor Sema and Anastasiia Parafeniuk reported from Kyiv, and Yuliya Talmazan and Leila Sackur from London.
This article was originally published on http://www.NBCNews.com
Photo: Musicians Svitlana Siemieikina and Kristina Spitsina who were killed in the missile attack in Zaporizhzhia on August 9th.(Yulia Bielashkova)