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A 14-year-old girl vanished in Russia after a drone strike burned her family’s home to the ground. Her body was never found.

Source: Meduza

Ukrainian drones struck Tuapse in the early hours of April 16 — the first in a series of large-scale attacks on the Tuapse oil refinery and the Rosneft marine terminal that together caused an environmental disaster in the city.

Krasnodar Krai authorities said 60 residential buildings were damaged in the attack, most of them private homes but also several apartment buildings. One drone struck the home of Tatyana and Andrei Bokovy on Sochinskaya Street — directly into the bedroom of their youngest daughter, 14-year-old Valeria Bokova. The explosion and fire left nothing but rubble.

“I heard an explosion beyond the hill. My bed is right next to the window. I leaned out to see what was happening. And I see a drone flying over the neighbors’ house. It’s flying slowly, throwing off sparks. It had probably already been hit. And it comes down right on the house. In the spot where their living room was. An explosion, glass flew everywhere, my window was blown out. I hear screaming: ‘Help, help,’” a neighbor of the Bokovys told journalists from the Russian news outlet 93.ru.

Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev announced immediately after the attack that the girl had been killed. The Russian Investigative Committee agreed and opened a criminal case on terrorism charges. Media reported that members of the Bokovy family had fought in the Russia–Ukraine war — Valeria’s father and older brother had both fought at the front. The brother was killed.

Rescue workers and volunteers spent three days continuously clearing the rubble on Sochinskaya Street. At one point, a live cat was pulled from beneath the debris. Lera Bokova’s body was never found. Various experts and local media sources speculated that the explosion inside the Bokovys’ home had been so powerful that no remains may have survived.

Authorities called in the LizaAlert search-and-rescue team, which also turned up nothing. “We conducted search operations there in the first few days,” the team’s press secretary, Rima Oganyan, told a correspondent from the independent Russian media outlet Takie Dela. “When the attack happened, every resource the city had was mobilized — it was complete chaos. Our best canine unit went out there, and our people also conducted a survey of the area. Based on their work, we ultimately concluded our operations.”

The Russian Investigative Committee, which works directly with LizaAlert, issued an official finding that the girl had died. “If the authorities bring us back in, we’ll of course take part, but at this point we don’t see the point… If we had even a 1% lead, we’d have pulled in search teams from all over the country,” the team’s representative added.

The Bokovy family was not persuaded. Relatives plastered the city with missing-person notices, holding out hope for a miracle. The Ratibоrets charitable foundation, which raises targeted aid for participants in the war against Ukraine, joined the search.

On April 24, the girl’s mother, Tatyana Bokova, made a public statement on camera, saying she did not believe the official version. In her view, Lera had time to escape during the explosion and could have fled the burning house in a state of shock and hidden in the woods.

“I personally went to her room at 2:05 a.m. and set up a lamp because the power had gone out. At 2:40, my husband and I left the hallway. There was no way the child could have run past us. We went into our room… Literally 15 to 17 minutes later, the explosion happened. Our room was buried. While we were digging ourselves out, the child had the opportunity to run,” Tatyana Bokova said.

She also said no investigators in Tuapse had ever called her in for questioning, and that the order declaring her daughter dead had been handed down from Moscow. In support of the theory that Lera might be hiding somewhere nearby, she added that after her daughter’s disappearance someone had tried to make a call from her phone — but investigators had allegedly brushed it off.

Ratibоrets backed the parents’ theory that Lera may have suffered a concussion or even lost her memory from the shock but was still alive and hiding somewhere. Volunteers continued the search, combing nearby abandoned buildings, a cemetery, and a tree line, and publishing daily video updates.

At various points they reported finding a barefoot print in the woods matching Lera’s shoe size of 36. They then said a Ratibоrets drone equipped with a thermal camera had detected Lera’s movements in the woods — but when the search team arrived, no one was there and the drone had run out of battery. Finally, after two weeks of searching, one of the Ratibоrets staff members said he had seen the girl alive in the woods but that she had pushed him away and run off. All of these reports were later refuted.

In the end, Ratibоrets’s activities only irritated local residents, who accused the foundation’s staff of running fundraising campaigns in parallel with the search and of blocking other volunteers from joining the operation.

“This is a nightmare! They won’t let locals join the search! People show up and get turned away. It’s not in their interest to have people there who know the terrain and know there are no footprints in the moss! We even went to the police, and they told us: ‘We know all about Ratibоrets, but there’s nothing we can do.’ You understand — they’re connected to the SVO, you can’t touch people like that…” a Krasnodar Krai resident named Natalya told the independent Russian media outlet Takie Dela.

Some Tuapse residents believe Lera may have been threatened and hidden somewhere, since “as long as the search goes on, the donations keep rolling in.”

On May 3, Tatyana Bokova recorded a new video address. “The investigators have refuted the claim that she died. We’ve provided a lot of evidence, but unfortunately I can’t publish it — the investigators have forbidden it. Well, the police are always just sitting there pushing paper, so we’re conducting the search for our daughter ourselves,” she said.

Three weeks after Lera’s disappearance, on May 6, volunteers announced they were changing tactics and no longer expected to find the girl alive. “We are searching for the girl’s remains. They could be scattered over quite a large radius from the explosion,” they said. On May 9, Ratibоrets announced it was withdrawing from the search for Lera Bokova.