To See. To Empathize. To Know. To Tell: children of the Donbas become the heroes of social videos

They say that an armed conflict cannot have face or voice. The Rinat Akhmetov Foundation disproves this saying, showing the whole world the stories of civilians in the Donbas. The photo book Donbas and Civilians became one of the projects telling about the tragedy of people living on both sides of the confrontation line. The book was presented in London, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Brussels. Foreigners were surprised to learn that today, civilians are being killed every day right in the center of Europe.

“Not just abroad but even in here, in Ukraine, many people have forgotten that their compatriots still endure sufferings. That’s why the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation continues to show the society the stories of people who found themselves in the epicenter of the largest armed conflict of the 21st century. The Foundation produced several social videos featuring the photo book’s heroes under the general title To See. To Empathize. To Know. To Tell,” Tetiana Kukhotska, Director for Project Development at the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation says.

Today, the Foundation presents a video of Donbas and Civilians series, which tells about Daniil Sysoyev from Krasnohorivka. The boy’s story is simply astonishing. Many believe that what happened to him was a true miracle.

In February 2015, Danya [a diminutive of Daniil] came out onto the balcony to take clothes off the rope where they were drying. Suddenly, shelling started. One of the missiles hit the House of Culture standing across the five-story building where the Sysoyev family lived. The shockwave blew off the glass in the apartment building’s windows and threw the boy off the balcony. The lad was span into the air but somehow has managed to catch a hold of the balcony rails. He hanged on the rails and cried: “Mama, help me! Mama, where are you?”

“I was just coming home at that time, when a neighbor called me and said that Danya fell down from the fifth floor. He hung on in the air, holding the rails, for 15 minutes and then fell down,” Natalia Sysoyeva, Daniil’s mother says.

The boy fell onto the sidewalk and was struck in the head by a reinforcement bar sticking out of the asphalt. The metal bar broke the skull bones and smashed the left part of the brain. The kid was brought to Kurakhove City Hospital, where surgeons removed bone fragments from his brain.

“By the time I got to Kurakhove the surgery has finished. I was allowed to see my son in the ICU. I could not recognize Danya: his head was swollen to an unbelievable size, his body was blue from bruises, and he was entwined in tubes of life support equipment,” Natalia says, crying.

When asked whether the boy will live, the surgeons just spread their hands: “The child is, in fact, dead. He has a traumatic brain injury incompatible with life.”

But what happened then was a true miracle. Danya has not just survived. He learned anew how to walk, to talk and to do all things that ordinary children can do.

“Thousands of people were praying for Danya. Later on, these people were helping us with medicines and rehabilitation. I want to thank them all. I also would like to thank the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation for inviting my son to the Rehabilitation of Wounded Children project,” Natalia Sysoyeva says.

The lives of Daniil and millions of other people living in the Donbas are still in danger, as the armed conflict continues.

“Since the outbreak of the War in Donbas, Rinat Akhmetov saved lives of more than a million people on both sides of the confrontation line. This is one million fates! The story of each of them is worth a separate tale. Our Foundation will be telling about them, so that people living far from the warzone do not forget about the tragedy of civilians in the Donbas,” Tetiana Kukhotska said.