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 Friday, Svitlana’s father, Yuriy Siemieikin, said the girls 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 with 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 next 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 the day they died, 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 said.
Ukrainian officials said the Russian rocket hit a residential quarter in Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday, killing Svitlana and Kristina and injuring nine other people, including an 11-month-old baby. A church and shops were also damaged.
Russia denies hitting Ukrainian civilians or civilian infrastructure. There was no public reaction to the attack or the girls’ death from Moscow. The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since the outbreak of war in February last year, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has estimated that 9,083 civilians have been killed. The actual number is likely to be considerably higher, given the difficulty of gathering and corroborating information in areas where fighting is ongoing.
Siemieikin, Svitlana’s father, said he was at home in the city’s suburbs when he heard the explosion from far away. “I immediately started to call her, but she didn’t answer. I started to realize that something was wrong,” he said.
He said that after he grabbed his backpack and first aid kit, he drove to the city center, picking up Halyna Spitsyna on the way. When he arrived at the scene, he said, “Kristina was still alive and had left yet some signs of life, and Svitlana was there, already dead.”
Kristina would be pronounced dead later.
Siemieikin, a railway worker, said his daughter initially enjoyed rock bands like Queen and Nirvana.
“Later, when she became more professional, she switched to the Ukrainian artists and started to copy them, to learn from them and to play their songs,” he said. The pair, who made up a musical duo known as the Similar Girls, wrote and recorded their own music, Siemieikin said.
His daughter was also a foreign languages student at a local university, he added, and dreamed of going to South Korea one day as a fan of K-pop.
Kristina’s mom, Spitsyna, 44, a furniture factory sales manager, said her daughter was “surrounded by musicians since she was a kid, because I had many friends among them.”
Kristina “grew up in music,” she said, adding that her daughter started dancing when she was 5 and performed onstage. From there, “she became interested in singing,” she said. By Victor Sema, Anastasiia Parafeniuk,Yuliya Talmazan and Leila Sackur NBC
