Mourners clutching roses gathered near Maidan Square in Ukraine’s capital to pay their final respects to those who died in the shock accident, while Russian claimed more killings and new territorial gains.
“:”Seven coffins were hoisted into the echoing hall in central Kyiv on Saturday by military pallbearers in full ceremonial dress, to the sound of a lone trumpet and army-style snare drum. Mourners in black and clutching roses had earlier gathered near Maidan Square in Ukraine’s capital to pay final respects to interior minister Denys Monastyrsky and his colleagues, who died in a shock helicopter accident earlier this week. “They were not broken by the war, and they did not allow others to be broken,” the eulogist and moderator of the ceremony told the hundreds of mourners that included senior government officials. Monastyrsky, a 42-year-old trained lawyer who took up his post in 2021, was one of nine people on board a state emergency services helicopter when it crashed this week near a nursery school and residential block in the Kyiv commuter town of Brovary. He was among an emerging generation of politicians in Ukraine, and was the highest-ranking official to die following Russia’s invasion launched in February last year. The moderator explained during the ceremony that it was Monastyrsky himself who called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 24 last year to tell him that Russia had invaded. It was Monastyrsky, he added, who had orchestrated the distribution of arms to residents of the capital as Russian forces closed in.
