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Two budding Ukrainian musicians were killed in an airstrike in the city of Zaporizhzhia last week that left nine other people injured.
A video of twenty-one-year-old Kristina Spitsyna and eighteen-year-old Svitlana Siemieikina showed them singing on the streets hours before their death.
Tragedies like this happen every day, said Lesya Bizid, a teacher at San Antonio’s first Ukrainian language and culture school. The school teaches children ages 4-12.
“I saw so many people without legs, without feet, without eyes. These two girls, they were amazing, but they are not the first and they are not the last,” Bizid said.
The young women called themselves Similar Girls, and they sang songs of loss and love. They often performed on sidewalks, and they uploaded their videos to Instagram and TikTok.
“By killing many other talented artists, singers, actors, poets, Russia stole from Ukraine its cultural future,” Bizid explained.
The deaths of these young women come as Ukrainians around the world prepare to commemorate the Independence Day of Ukraine.
Dmytro Kovalskyy is a board member of Ukrainian San Antonio. The organization has worked to shed light on the war.
Kovalskyy explained that he’s seen a decline in discussions of the war in the United States.
“The challenge, people get tired of the war. First weeks, months it was full of [social media] posts every corner. Now it’s not,” he said.
Kovalskyy hoped that Americans move past the Democrat and Republican binaries when thinking of the war and instead view the mass casualties for what they really are.
“You can play this political party game when rules are respected by everyone. War is going over the rules. War is when somebody comes into your house and shoots you,” he said.
Both Bizid and Kovalskyy expressed sorrow over the singers' deaths, and they also mourned the loss of thousands of other artists.
“In this war, Ukraine loses a lot of educated, highly prominent, patriotic people who want to defend their country. You can defend your country being on the front line or you can be an artist,” Kovalskyy said.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report in August that explained that at least 9,444 civilians were killed since February 2022, but the number is likely higher.
Spitsyna, 18, and Siemieikina, 21, were buried next to each other. — two of the many losses the Ukrainian community has endured since the beginning of the war.
