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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Ryan Merrifield

Ukrainian mum and daughter who lost legs in train station attack learn to walk again

A mum and child who both lost their legs during a missile strike at a railway station in Ukraine can now walk again.

Natalia Stepanenko, 43, and 11-year-old Yana were caught up in the shell attack on Kramatorsk railway station on April 8 which killed 59 people, including seven children.

A further 100 were injured.

But miraculously, thanks to innovative prosthetics made in the US, the mum and daughter are back on the move.

Natalia lost one leg below the knee and Yana lost both legs, with the pair spending several months at the Lviv Children's Hospital of St Nicholas.

They were then flown to California in July, thanks to The Right to Walk Foundation which helps amputees.

Along with Yana's twin brother Yaroslav, they spent a year in Mira Mesa, San Diego, receiving rehab at Peter Harsch Prosthetics.

Ukrainian mother Natalia Stepanenko sits in a wheelchair after losing part of her left leg (Getty Images)

Peter Harsch told ABC News 10: "Blast wounds disperse shrapnel and rocks and dirt, and what we have with Yana and her mom is we have limbs that were blown off in a very traumatic way.

"The goal of surgeons [and] doctors at the time was just to save their life, so there’s a little bit of detail that has been missed."

Days after arriving, Yana took her first steps on July 30.

The Right to Walk Foundation wrote on Facebook : "Can’t believe that Yana, suffering from such traumatic amputations and bone regrowth issues, rehabilitated so fast."

Ukrainian schoolgirl Yana Stepanenko, 11, sits in a wheelchair (Getty Images)

Natalia and her children had gone to the station in the hopes of being able to flee the Donbas in the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

She hoped to take her kids to stay with family in Ivano-Frankivsk in the west.

Her partner had been conscripted to fight, while the children's father is believed to have died during the war.

Yaroslav was sat watching their luggage while his mum and sister were on the station platform getting cups of tea when the Russian Tochka-U missile hit at about 10.30am.

Speaking to United for Ukraine, Natalia later said she didn't remember hearing the explosion but in the aftermath recalls blood everywhere.

Yana's twin brother Yaroslav (right) has also joined his mum and sister in the US (Getty Images)

"I couldn’t get up. It was very painful — I looked at my legs and cried," she said.

Following the station attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lashed out on social media, accusing the invading troops of "cynically destroying the civilian population" and called it "an evil without limits".

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said at the time the attack was a war crime and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of "criminal endeavour" in Ukraine.

Speaking at a press conference in Bucharest, Romania, he said: "Not very far away this morning, in a place called Kramatorsk, what appears to be Russian missiles struck civilian people queuing for trains to seek a safer place from the war.

"The striking of civilian critical infrastructure is a war crime. These were precision missiles aimed at people trying to seek humanitarian shelter."

The Kremlin denied responsibility for the attacks and accused Kyiv of shelling its own people.

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