They met in high school but became a couple years later after meeting on the dance floor of a nightclub in Ukraine. Married in 2001, they lived in an apartment in a Kiev suburb with their two children and their dogs, Benz and Cake. She was an accountant; he is a computer programmer.
Serhiy and Tetiana Perebyinis had a Chevrolet minivan. They shared a country house with friends. Tetiana Perebyinis did gardening and loved to ski. She had just returned from Georgia, where she had gone skiing.
Then, late last month, Russia invaded Ukraine and before long the fighting moved to the capital, Kiev. It didn’t take long for their city to be hit by artillery shells. One night a bomb fell on their building, driving Tetiana Perebyinis and her children to take refuge underground. Finally, with her husband having traveled to the east of the country to care for his sick mother, Tetiana decided it was time to flee with her children.
They didn’t. Tetiana, 43, and her children Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, died on Sunday as they ran across the remains of a damaged bridge in her town of Irpin, trying to reach Kiev. A church volunteer who was helping them, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, died with them.
Their luggage—a blue suitcase on wheels, a gray suitcase, and a few backpacks—was spread out near the bodies, along with a green cage for carrying a dog, which was barking nonstop.
They were four of the many people who tried to cross that bridge this past weekend, but their deaths had repercussions far beyond their Ukrainian suburb. A photo of the family and Berezhnyi lying on the ground, bloodied and dead, taken by The New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario, sums up the indiscriminate slaughter by an invading Russian army that has increasingly attacked densely populated civilian areas.
The life and final hours of the Perebyinis family were described in an interview given by Serhiy Perebyinis and the godmother of one of his children, Polina Nedava. Serhiy, who is also 43, learned of his family’s death via Twitter, in posts made by Ukrainians.
In tears, Perebyinis said that the night before his wife died he told her he was so sorry he wasn’t with her.
“I said, ‘Forgive me for not being able to defend you,'” he said. ” ‘I tried to take care of a person and that’s why I can’t protect you.'”
She said, “Don’t worry, let’s get out of here.”
When that didn’t happen, Perebyinis said he thought it was important that their deaths were captured in photos and video. “The whole world needs to know what’s going on here,” he said.
The Perebyinis family had already been displaced by war once, in 2014, when they lived in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, and Russia fomented a separatist uprising. They moved to Kiev to escape the fighting and began to rebuild their lives. Sergei said that when Russian tanks began invading Ukraine last month, they could hardly believe that history was repeating itself.
Tetiana Perebyinis worked for SE Ranking, a software company with offices in California and London. The company encouraged its employees to leave Ukraine as soon as the fighting broke out. He had even rented a place for them to stay in Poland, Serhiy said. But his wife postponed the match because she wasn’t sure how she could evacuate her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
On Saturday, after spending two days underground, the family made a first attempt to leave. But as they were loading their belongings into the minivan, a tank arrived on the street in front of the building. They decided to wait.
The next morning they were up at 7 am, getting ready to leave. Tetiana had discussed the plan thoroughly with her husband. She, her two children and her parents, who lived nearby, would join a group of churchgoers and try to leave for Kiev, then try to get somewhere safer from the capital.
They drove as far as they could into Irpin, but then Tetiana was forced to abandon the minivan. They set out on foot towards the damaged bridge over the River Irpin.
To escape, they had to cross about a hundred meters of exposed street on one side of the bridge. When Russian forces fired into the area, many people tried to take cover behind a brick wall.
Berezhnyi, the church volunteer, had evacuated his own family before but returned to help others. He was with Tetiana Perebyinis and her children when they started running the other way.
Throughout the night Serhiy Perebyinis had tried to monitor where his wife was, using their cell phone locator app. But the app didn’t show anything: the family was underground, with no cell signal.
He said that around dawn he saw a “ping” showing the family’s address. But there was nothing to show them in motion. Cell phone reception had become very erratic in the city.
The next locator ping on Serhiy’s phone arrived at 10 am on Sunday. The phone was at Clinical Hospital No. 7 in Kiev. Something had gone wrong.
He called his wife’s number. The phone rang, but no one answered. Sergei called his children’s phones and had the same result.
Half an hour later, he saw a post on Twitter saying that a family had died in a mortar attack on the Irpin evacuation route. Shortly after, another post appeared on Twitter, this one with a photo. “I recognized the bags and that’s how I found out about what had happened,” he said.
When asked to describe his wife, Serhiy Perebyinis slumps into his chair. Polina Nedava said that Tetiana had a light spirit, that she liked to play games and used to brighten the environment around her.
Over the many years they were married, Serhiy said, “we renovated three apartments and we didn’t have a single disagreement.”
Anatoly Berezhnyi had taken his wife to western Ukraine but returned to Irpin to help with the evacuation organized by his church, Irpin Bible Church, according to Pastor Mykola Romaniuk.
He said that when the mortar attack began, with projectiles initially falling a few hundred meters away, other church volunteers saw Berezhnyi run to help Tetiana Perebyinis. “He took her suitcase and they started running.”
According to the pastor, Berezhnyi was a quiet and generous man. “He was the kind of friend who is always ready to help, no need to say anything,” said Romaniuk. “I don’t know how God can forgive crimes like these.”
In mid-February, before the start of the war, Serhiy Perebyinis had traveled to his hometown of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine to care for his mother, who was sick with Covid. When hostilities began, the crossing point was closed, and he was unable to leave the east of the country.
To return to Kiev from separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine after the death of his family, Serhiy traveled to Russia and boarded a plane to the city of Kaliningrad to cross a land border with Poland. He said that at the Russian-Poland border, Russian guards interrogated him, took his fingerprints and seemed willing to arrest him for reasons that were unclear. But they ended up allowing him to continue his journey.
He said he told guards, “My entire family died in what you call a special operation and we call it a war. You can do what you want with me. I have nothing left to lose.”
Translation by Clara Allain
