As Russian forces bombarded areas outside Kyiv this month, a 4-year-old boy set off with his grandmother to flee missile strikes and shelling by boat—but their daring river escape backfired when the boat they were in capsized and his grandmother drowned, his family said.
Now, little Alexander Yakhno, or Sasha for short, could be anywhere in Europe or Ukraine—and a desperate search is underway to reunite him with his family.
He was the only one in the boat wearing a life jacket at the time the boat capsized under heavy artillery fire. But he was nowhere to be found when the bodies of his fellow passengers were discovered in the Dnipro river the next day, on March 11, according to his mother, Anna Yakhno.
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“There were eight people in the boat. They found my mother in law, along with another woman who was with them, the next day. Along with the boat itself. The women were dead. There are still six people, including Sasha, who they are searching for. Absolutely everyone is searching. But there are hostilities in the area,” Yakhno told Ukrainian media at the time.
The fighting was so intense, she said, that the family couldn’t even retrieve Sasha’s grandmother’s body.
“We asked local residents to bury her,” Yakhno said.
Nearly three weeks later, Anna says she is still “hanging in there” as the family continues to search for Sasha.
“I have faith that we will find Sasha,” she told The Daily Beast.
Her mother, Alyona, said waiting for Sasha to be found was agonizing for the family, but that they weren’t losing hope.
The question is where Sasha may have wound up after the chaotic evacuation. Several other Ukrainian evacuees were reported to be in the boat with him, and it is thought they may have taken him to a safe place or a nearby village, though many surrounding areas have been inaccessible due to ongoing hostilities so search efforts there have been hampered.
Some have even suggested the boy may have been taken across the border to Europe, though so far, those claims have proven unfounded, according to the family.
In Italy, following statements from activists that Sasha may have entered Italy, the Associazione Cittadini del Mondo Odv of Cagliari, a Sardinian-based NGO, and the Ukrainian honorary consul in Sardinia spoke with Sasha’s family and issued a widespread appeal about the missing 4-year-old on Wednesday.
Two possible sightings of Sasha were also reported in Verona and Napoli, according to Italian media.
But similar sightings had earlier failed to pan out, with a false alarm in Romania about two weeks into the search, Anna Yakhno said.
The boy’s grandmother, Alyona, said reports of Sasha being in Italy had just left people with “incorrect information” about his whereabouts, and the family was left responding to thousands of messages from well-wishers searching for the boy there.
“It really complicated our searches for him and such a burst of reactions [to that claim] wore us out,” she said.
