Maria Troyanivska had come home early the night a Russian drone hit her bedroom.
“Itflew in through the window, right into her room,” her mother Viktoria tells the BBC. After the explosion, she and her husband Volodymyr ran from the next room to find their daughter’s room on fire.
“We tried to put it out, but everything was burning so strongly,” she says through tears. “It was impossible to breathe – we had to leave.”
The Russian Shahed drone killed the 14-year-old in her bed, in her suburban apartment in Kyiv, last month.
“She died immediately, and then burned,” her mother said. “We had to bury her in a closed coffin. She had no chance of surviving.”
Russia is massively increasing drone strikes on Ukraine. More than 2,000 were launched in October, according to Ukraine’s general staff- a record number in this war.
The same report says Russia fired 1,410 drones in September, and 818 in August – compared with around 1,100 for the entire three-month period before that.
It’s part of a wider resurgence for Russian forces. The invaders are advancing all along the front lines. North Korean troops have joined the war on Moscow’s side. And with the election of Donald Trump for a second term as US president, Ukraine’s depleted and war-weary forces are facing uncertain support from their biggest military donor.
The majority of the Russian drones raining down on Ukraine are Iranian-designed Shaheds: propeller-driven, with a distinctive wing shape and a deadly warhead packed into the nose cone.
Russia has also started to launch fake drones, without any explosives, to confuse Ukraine’s air defence units and force them to waste ammunition.
Compared to missiles they are much cheaper to build, easier to fire, and designed to sap morale.
Every night, Ukrainians go to sleep to notifications pinging on their phones, as inbound drones crisscross the country, setting sirens blaring.
And every morning, they wake to news of yet another strike. Just since the start of November, drones have hit Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia.
On Sunday, Russia launched 145 drones at Ukraine, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky – a record number for a single day since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Kyiv said that day it had managed to shoot down 62 drones, and that a further 67 were “lost” – meaning they were either downed by electronic warfare, or disappeared from radar screens.
Ukrainian air defences are struggling to cope with the surging numbers.