KURSK, August 21. /TASS/. A pregnant woman shot by the Ukrainian military while evacuating from Kurilovka in the Kursk Region was able to shield her two-year-old son, who was sitting in the back seat of the car they were driving in, from a barrage of bullets, her husband Artyom Kuznetsov told TASS.

The media reported earlier that on August 6 the Ukrainian military opened fire on a family that was evacuating from the Kursk Region's Kurilovka. A pregnant woman died, and her two-year-old son was wounded.

"Our son received three shrapnel wounds from the body of the car. It wasn't even the glass, it was the metal that the bullets tore through. It almost reached his kidney. I thank God that my son is alive. My wife caught the bullet instinctively, because he was behind her. I think she just shielded him with her body," Kuznetsov said.

The family left the village in two cars. The father was in the first one, and the other family members were in the second one. They came across a Ukrainian soldier, who opened fire at them on the road.

"I felt my car start to be pelted, as if with stones. I turned my head and there he was, literally two meters away from me - a Ukrainian soldier with a blue armband and a machine gun. He saw me, I saw him, and a bullet pierced my hood, my cap fell off. I realized that we were under fire. I saw one soldier, but I think there were several of them - it was like a hailstorm of bullets. I drove past him, my wife was driving about hundred meters behind me," Kuznetsov said.

The family managed to escape the area while under fire, after which Kuznetsov took his wounded wife and son to the nearest hospital.

"A nurse came. I carried my wife to the second floor, to the surgery ward, she is still lying there. She was not evacuated from there, she was not taken out at all. Her body is in the place where I tried to resuscitate her. The doctors did everything they could, while I was standing in the corridor, my heart ripping in two. I realized I couldn't save her. A nurse came out and said my wife had died. She was two months pregnant. We were about to have our second child. Just like that, it all happened in the blink of an eye. My whole life turned upside down," he said.

Kuznetsov urged Western countries to press Ukraine to open humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave and evacuate the dead.