A deadly Russian airstrike has killed one of Ukraine’s most talented young sambo fighters alongside his entire family.
Artyom Priymenko, 16, and his family died when bombs hit residential homes in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine on Monday (March 7).
The teenage champion’s father Vitaly, mother Ekaterina, paternal grandmother and two younger brothers Egor and Kirill died with him, his coach Evgeny Leonenko said.
Leonenko said: “This is a great sorrow for the family of sambo wrestlers, his relatives and for all of us.”
They were among 21 who died in the strike late on Monday, reports say.
Leonenko added: “Artyom was a multiple winner of the Ukrainian Sambo Championships.
“Last year he won a gold medal in Kherson in the 88 kg weight.
“He won a place in the Ukrainian national team for the World Cup in The Netherlands. He was very promising.”
A humanitarian corridor opened at 9am on Tuesday, allowing 5,000 to evacuate, reports claim.
But the deadly nighttime bombing which killed the teenage wrestler and his family came around 11 hours earlier.
Sambo is a Russian martial art popular across the ex-USSR, originating in the 1920s when soldiers of the Red Army developed their own hand-to-hand combat technique – and the combat sport is loved by Vladimir Putin.
As a child, Putin was a keen sambo and judo wrestler – and the International Sambo Federation (FIAS) president Vasily Shestakov, 68, the Kremlin leader’s ex-coach, said he could have been a top-level competitor if he had not become a KGB spy.
“Sambo and judo may have lost a great athlete, but the country has found a great president,” he said once.
Commenting on Priymenko’s death, Alexey Shershnev, posted: “Please send this terrible news to Putin’s childhood friend, the president of the International Sambo Federation Vasily Shestakov – a decent man – and Russian fighters.
“Perhaps this will change their attitude to the ‘special military operation’.”
Putin has vowed to make sambo an Olympic sport.
Russia has claimed it is striking military targets but the toll of civilians rises by the day, prompting two million Ukrainians to flee abroad.
According to Putin’s tightly controlled state media, the desperate population are instead “fleeing the terror organised by local nationalists”.