Thick smoke over Kharkiv; Russian forces inch toward Kyiv; US citizen among people killed in Chernihiv
In his last Facebook post, United States citizen James Whitney Hill described the intensifying bombing around where he lived in Ukraine and said, “No way out,” before authorities identified him as the American who was among the dead in the war.
The Minnesota native lived there with his partner, Ira, who is Ukrainian and could not leave because of her battle with multiple sclerosis.
Even as he detailed a chilling account of his last days in Ukraine — intense bombing, limited food and cold — he never thought about leaving “because he was not going to leave Ira’s side in her condition,” said his sister Katya Hill, who lives in the US in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The specifics around his death have not been confirmed to her, and she told CNN she is still trying to locate his body. She said her family is trying to reach Sen. Amy Klobuchar, or Minnesota, and Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.
“We don’t know where my brother’s body is. So that kind of closure the family won’t have right now. So any help that somebody can let us know on that would be greatly appreciated,” she said Thursday.
“We’ll do a prayer service,” she said. “What can I say? The hardest thing that we’re going to have to go through is not having that kind of closure.”
In the meantime, she also had not yet been able to connect with Hill’s partner, Ira.
With electricity out, Hill had been reserving battery on his phone, she said, adding, “I can only assume that Ira’s mother’s phone is unable to be charged at this point.”
She remembered her brother has “the helper that people find in a crisis.”
“He had a stash of chocolate that he was keeping so he could hand out chocolates when someone … needed encouragement,” she told CNN.
