A photo of a woman's hand, taken by Reuters photographer Zohra Bonsemra, has hit the headlines of the world media. Characteristic in the photo is a woman's manicure – red with a white heart on the ring finger. It was thanks to him that her relatives and acquaintances recognized her.

«For the first time in her life she had her own cosmetics»

The woman in the photo is Irina Filkina. In April, Irina Filkina was 53 years old. She worked as a boiler room operator in Kyiv, and in early 2022 she enrolled in make-up courses. It was her teacher, make-up artist from Gostomel Anastasia Subacheva, who first recognized her student Irina in a photo with a red manicure.

She made a characteristic red manicure on Valentine's Day, prepared for Ola Polyakova's concert and completed a make-up course on the eve of the war. That day, Anastasia recalls, Irina received her own cosmetics for the first time and was happy that she was doing her makeup lessons.

«She was going to Polyakova's concert, started Instagram and shared all her fantastic events and joys.
She held my hand and said: “Donya, in my old age I finally understood the most important thing – you need to love yourself and live for yourself! And finally I will live as I want! So you live now as you want, not for a man , and for yourself!"»

– Anastasia remembers

«She did not have time to get home 15 minutes»

When the war broke out, Iryna lived in the local Epicenter, where she fed people hiding from the shelling and prepared food for the Ukrainian military. On March 5, Iryna Filkina tried to leave Bucha in one of the cars that was evacuating people from a shopping center outside the city, but she did not have enough space. So she decided to return home on a bicycle. She was shot dead by the Russian military a 15-minute drive away.

«Returning home, where for everyone, as it seemed to me before, the safest place. She was shot in the middle of the street, less than 15 minutes away, with a bullet the size of my finger»

– wrote in Instagram Olga Shchiruk, one of Irina's two daughters.

26-year-old Olga managed to go abroad in the first days of the war. In an interview with CNN, she said that the last time she spoke to her mother was when she was returning home on a bicycle to the outskirts of Bucha. She was out of touch for almost a month, but she hoped her mother was alive. On April 1, Irina's birthday, she received a video showing her mother's body lying in the middle of a street in Bucha.

She was known to all her friends as “Mother Ira", people loved her tendency to support everyone around. When Irina went to the sea in Egypt for the first time in her life two years ago, “everyone in the hotel fell in love with her. They said:“Mother Ira, come back"», her daughter remembers.

Until the last moment, Olga Shchyruk hoped that her mother was alive and she managed to hide from the occupiers somewhere in the basement. On April 5, the Ukrainian military informed the family that Iryna Filkina had died, but her family could not take her body and bury it, as the mother's body had to be examined first.

Olga created a fund to help Ukrainians affected by the war.

“I want the photo of her hand to be a symbol of new beginnings. This symbol tells the occupiers that they can do anything with us, but they cannot take away the main thing: love. The love of people that they do not have"

– says Olga.

In a comment to the Polish TV channel Fakty, Olga clarified that the money that the benefactors will transfer to the fund will be donated to help Ukrainian children who lost their parents in the war.