Ukrainian Mother 'Miraculously' Saves Baby Girl By Shielding Her During Missile Strike

A Ukrainian mother is recovering from the serious wounds she suffered while shielding her infant daughter from shrapnel blasts in Kyiv.

Olga, 27, said she woke up to feed her six-week-old baby, Victoria, when the missile strike took place. The child’s father, Dmytro, woke up to the sound of shattering glass and said they could hear heavy shelling at night coming closer and closer toward them before the building near their house was struck in the morning, according to The Guardian.

“When I went outside, I saw that the shell hit a kindergarten near our house. There are no more ceilings, and the houses nearby don’t have windows and doors anymore. The pieces of the glass flew straight at us,” Dmytro recalled, according to a Facebook post put up Friday by the Okhmatdyt Children’s hospital in Kyiv.

Olga said she had already covered her baby with a blanket to keep her warm before the blasts left their room covered in shattered glass.

“And that’s what kept the baby alive. I just got her covered in time. And then Dmytro jumped up and covered us, too,” Olga told Reuters.

The mother was horrified to see blood on her baby. “I was wounded in the head, and blood started flowing. And it all flowed on the baby,” Olga told the publication and added, “I couldn’t understand, I thought it was her blood.”

As Dmytro took the child, Olga began screaming and saying their daughter was wounded.

“Olga, it’s your blood, it’s not hers,” she recalled Dmytro’s response.

The family received medical attention from the Okhmatdyt Children’s hospital Friday. Olga’s act of shielding her baby resulted in “miraculously saving her daughter from the injuries,” the hospital said on Facebook.

“Olga herself has received numerous shrapnel wounds…” the hospital went on to say. “The doctors treated the father’s injured leg and performed surgery on Olga, removing multiple fragments stuck in her body. The family continues treatment at our hospital.”

As the family recovers, Dmytro said staying positive is all that they can do now.

"There's nothing left for us to do but to stay positive,” Dmytro told Reuters, “just to believe that it was the worst, the most horrible thing that could have happened in our lives.”