HORRIBLE

4-Year-Old Sasha, Lost in Desperate River Escape, Found Dead in Ukraine

The family had held out hope that the boy had survived after the boat he was fleeing in capsized under heavy artillery fire.

Four-year-old Alexander Yakhno, or Sasha for short, was found dead in Ukraine on Monday, Voice of America reported. As The Daily Beast previously reported, Sasha had fled with his grandmother when Russian forces slammed areas outside Kyiv last month. His grandmother then drowned when their boat capsized under heavy artillery fire on the Dnipro river. With no sign of the child, who was the only passenger wearing a lifejacket, the family had held out hope that he had survived. “I have faith that we will find Sasha,” his mother told The Daily Beast, amid previous false sightings of the tyke in Italy and Romania. Sasha was at least the 165th child to have been killed so far in the course of the six-week-old Russian invasion.