Reporter's Notebook: Mom and daughter's incredible account after Russian missile hit their...

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."For the record, Ekaterina’s and Xenia’s scars are real. But, for now, she is not thinking about the future She is fighting every day to get better as she lays bed-ridden healing from the injuries suffered in the blast. Doctors, however, believe she will walk normally again.

She also says that she will not renew her Russian passport which recently expired or return to the country of her birth, where her mother still lives because she does not want to “look into the faces of some people” who do not accept the reality of what is happening in Ukraine.

She says she feels the strength of her dead husband, Liosha, and she remembers his “humor, fun, sarcasm and sometimes black humor. People were in love with him and he was in love with life.”

She focuses on the positives, however small they may be, like the fact that the family’s cats were not found in the rubble of their apartment. It gives her hope that the cats were scared away by the first missile landing and might return to Xenia and Ekaterina one day.

For the hospital staff, however, they are “super heroes who survived.”

Said Anastasia Mageramova from Kyiv’s Childrens Hospital, who cared for them both in the days following the horrific events of Sunday, June 26: “Ekaterina is a symbol of strength, she’s a symbol of hope and she’s a symbol of Ukraine today.”