A Russian missile, filled with U.S. tech, rips a Ukrainian boy’s life apart
KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine - At the moment Russia launched the nearly four-ton ballistic missile, an 8-year-old Ukrainian boy was running across a playground.
The missile was an Iskander 9M723, fresh off an assembly line in Votkinsk, where workers in the Russian heartland plug American technology into the bellies of guided weapons, despite sanctions and export controls, Ukrainian investigators have found.
By late 2025, Russia had launched more than 400 of the Iskander-M rockets. This one, which took flight on April 4, was the 64th of the year. The Kremlin claimed that it was targeting a meeting of military officials at a restaurant, though surveillance footage showed only civilians there.
The boy was second-grader Matviy Holovko. His hometown of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial hub where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky grew up, suffered such frequent bombardment that he’d grown used to sleeping in the hallway. Matviy couldn’t remember life before the full-scale war that started when he was 5. He knew how to identify the roar of missiles and drones before he could tie his shoes or write his name.
On this Friday evening, the first warm day of spring, Matviy was chasing his toddler nephew across the sand. The Ukrainian winter was thawing, the playground loud with children. His mom and 28-year-old sister stood together, watching the boys play. For a moment, the war felt blissfully far.
But the Iskander was whipping toward them. Twenty-three football fields a second. Six times the speed of sound.
Every time one of these missiles lands, destroying power plants, hospitals, churches and schools, investigators search for clues in the wreckage. Almost every time, they note a disturbing detail. Though the weapons are manufactured in Russia, they are dependent on components from companies based in other countries, including the United States. Investigators have found parts from Intel. Parts from Analog Devices, best known for its semiconductors. Parts from Texas Instruments, famous for its graphing calculators.
Western components show up on Ukrainian soil nightly, sometimes numbering more than 100,000 in a single attack, Ukrainian officials say. A Senate subcommittee report published last year said that efforts by American companies to trace their products into Russia’s war machine have been “abjectly lacking.”
In emailed statements, Intel, Analog Devices and Texas Instruments similarly said that business ceased in Russia after 2022 and that the companies do not support the use of their products in Russian military equipment.
Pieces of this 64th Iskander, too, were later bagged, photographed and analyzed so that investigators, somehow, could attempt to decipher which companies and countries to hold accountable. But in trying to understand a weapon so powerful it destroys even evidence of itself, the answers are rarely straightforward. The attack, which killed 20 people, including nine kids, was declared the war’s single largest confirmed casualty of Ukrainian children.
The evening waning, Matviy and his mother, Vita Holovko, 50, said goodbye to his sister, Anastasia Prava, and her toddler. They walked to a small shop near the playground for a treat. For Vita, coffee and a cigarette. For Matviy, chocolate.
Air raid sirens wailed. Built to evade even the most advanced air defense systems, the Iskander flew 250 miles from Russia’s Rostov region in about three minutes. It was too late to find shelter.
Matviy looked up. He saw it, a blur of black in the sky.
For a final millisecond, the missile was whole.
At 6:50 p.m., it exploded.
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‘A hell you can’t describe’
Where there’d once been a playground, freshly painted in red and green, there were now only splintered wood, and small, slumped bodies, and smoke.
In a nearby school gymnasium, glass stabbed the eyes of 13-year-old Karolina Liashenko as she played volleyball. On the swings, shrapnel pierced the stomach and shredded the organs of 4-year-old Yaroslav Bykhno and carved through the bodies of 15-year-olds Danylo Nikitskyi and Alina Kutsenko as they walked hand in hand. In the back seat of his parents’ car, it killed 7-year-old Radyslav Yatsko while the rest of his family, sitting around him, lived.
“It was just hell, a hell you can’t describe,” said his mother, Anna Yatsko, 32, who was in the passenger seat holding her infant daughter, diaper prickling with broken glass.
Fragments of flaming-hot steel shot through the walls of the shop, spraying vodka onto the floor. Out front, Vita had just enough time to cover Matviy’s body with her own. Having absorbed the worst of the blast, she crumpled to the ground. Red bloomed on her winter coat. Matviy’s left arm was shredded, the bone snapped, the nerves and tendons severed.
The shopkeeper, fearing a second missile, urged Matviy and his mom to the safety of a nearby building. When Vita didn’t move, the shopkeeper dragged only Matviy with her. A police officer lashed on a tourniquet and sped him to a hospital, navigating through the bodies and burning cars. More than 70 people sought medical treatment that day, local officials said.
By the time Matviy’s father, Kostiantyn Holovko, 58, arrived at the scene, no one was trying to save Vita. He stood by his wife’s body for five hours, until the coroner arrived. Then he headed to the hospital to find his son, who was with Anastasia. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the boy that his mother was gone.
In the coming days, Matviy went in and out of three surgeries, all trying to save his arm. None worked. He woke up from the final operation to discover that his skin had been rounded into a stump just below his left shoulder.
“It’s gone,” he said flatly, looking at his dad.
“I’ll tell you later,” Kostiantyn replied.
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‘Purposefully, relentlessly’
It was already dark when a pair of investigators from the SBU, Ukraine’s main internal security service, arrived at the playground.
Early reports from the Ukrainian air force indicated that it was a ballistic missile. Equipped with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead, it blew up midair, then plowed an 11-foot crater into the ground. Thousands of shards of steel shot in every direction, splintering windows, slashing tree branches, puncturing the metal slide, splashing blood in the sandbox.
The investigators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with security service protocols, hunted for clues. Suspecting a 9M723, they kept an eye out for more than two dozen foreign parts known to be in the Iskander.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as HUR, catalogues these components in a public database. By 2024, the agency had identified around 2,800 foreign components in Russian weapons. By late 2025, that number surpassed 5,200. About 70 percent of the parts come from companies headquartered in the United States.
HUR found that promises made by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2022 to “severely restrict Russia’s access to technologies” had fallen short. The Commerce Department did not reply to a request for comment.
As the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion neared, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a panel of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, met to question executives from four companies that manufactured the majority of recovered American parts. A year-long investigation by the subcommittee’s Democratic staff found that some companies had “done the bare minimum required by law … while trying to wash their hands of any real responsibility for their distributors’ role in Russian diversion.”
“Russian bombs, missiles and drones supported by American technologies are literally killing Ukrainians,” subcommittee Chairman Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) told executives from Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel in late 2024. “Not just Ukrainian soldiers, but civilians, women, children, in their sleep, in hospitals, in schools, purposefully, relentlessly.”
The executives testified that there was little more they could do. Texas Instruments said that the company “devotes significant time and resources to keep chips out of the hands of bad actors” and “grieve[s] with those impacted.” Analog Devices said it was “always working to improve.” AMD had “redoubled our efforts … to prevent diversion,” and Intel continued to “stand with the people of Ukraine.”
In emailed statements in early December, Texas Instruments said that it “opposes the use of our chips in Russian military equipment.” Intel “take[s] these issues very seriously.” AMD is “committed to full compliance.” Analog Devices added that “combating the unauthorized resale, diversion, and misuse of products and technologies is a challenge the entire semiconductor industry faces.”
No easy solution was found that day. Microelectronics, which trickle through unsanctioned countries such as China and Turkey, are nearly impossible to track from manufacturer to rocket missile, said one Ukrainian intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“The only way we can meaningfully stop [the flow of components into Russia] is a regulation that puts the responsibility onto the company, meaning that it’s your job as a producer to make sure that your components do not reach Russia,” said Pavlo Shkurenko, a sanctions research fellow at the Kyiv School of Economics Institute. “It is very unlikely that this type of regulation will happen because these are powerful companies.”
On and near the playground in Kryvyi Rih, investigators found chunks of the missile’s fuselage, braided and burned polymers from electrical conductors, fragments of the fuel tank, and slivers of the rudders. Some pieces were stamped with still-legible serial numbers, proving that this missile was, indeed, an Iskander 9M723.
The missile, which carried 1,000 pounds of deadly explosives, was reduced to 83 fire-scarred hunks of metal. The investigators never recovered the microelectronics of the guidance system. They were probably sourced from American companies, multiple weapons experts said, and ensured the missile’s accuracy up to 10 meters. Small enough to hold in one hand, these parts incinerated on impact.
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A boy amid soldiers
Kostiantyn never figured out what to say to Matviy.
Instead of explaining what happened on the playground, he lied, telling him that his mom was also in the hospital, sleeping.
Someone needed to be honest with the 8-year-old. Anastasia, his older sister, knew it would have to be her. She’d been present when their mother gave birth, catching Matviy in her arms, the first to hold him. They’d shared difficult conversations before, including when Matviy and Vita fled to Lithuania for safety after Russia’s invasion, their family separated for half a year. But she struggled to explain the war to a child who already knew too much about it.
“Russia is attacking us,” she told Matviy. “Kids are being killed. Parents are being killed. Unfortunately, our mom … couldn’t make it. Her body left us, but she will stay in the sky and in your heart forever.”
Matviy didn’t react.
Normally upbeat with a big-cheeked smile, he missed his mom and was ashamed of his amputation. When the nonprofit Superhumans, which focuses on prostheses, rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery, contacted his sister about providing his first prosthetic arm, Matviy couldn’t make up his mind. Anastasia reminded him that he wasn’t the only injured child in Ukraine.
So, after spending a month in Dnipro at the region’s biggest trauma hospital, Matviy moved to the rehabilitation center in western Ukraine to be fitted with the first of dozens prostheses that he would need as he grew. He and his father shared a room, their twin beds separated by a desk topped with Lego. Matviy spread out his favorite Spider-Man blanket. His teacher mailed homework.
He was often the youngest patient wandering the hallways of amputees, a boy amid soldiers.
At home in Kryvyi Rih, Anastasia stripped their mother’s apartment of memories, replacing the windows shattered by the missile and boxing up her clothes. Just around the corner, she avoided the reopened coffee shop and the playground, where the faces of nine children were propped in a sea of toys.
It was now fall, the funerals long over. Grass overgrew the sandbox. Rain softened the plush animals. Twenty silver bells, for each of the victims, tinkled eerily in a tree. The families left behind wished it would all be bulldozed and replaced with a proper memorial.
And still the air raid sirens wailed.
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The perpetrators
By mid-November, the investigators from the SBU were finalizing a report that spanned 15 chapters and 3,750 pages.
They found that the 1st Missile Brigade of the 49th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District was responsible for launching the Iskander.
More specifically, they alleged that Col. Gen. Aleksey Kim, chief of staff for Russia’s Joint Group of Forces, and his deputy, Vice Adm. Alexander Peshkov, head of the Joint Center for Planning and Coordination of Enemy Fire Damage, organized and led the attack.
To plan and prepare it, they relied on Rear Adm. Aleksey Petrushyn, leader of the Intelligence Management and Fire Damage Coordination Center of the joint Russian military grouping, and Col. Alexander Kisiedobriev, head of the missile forces and artillery directorate of the joint military grouping.
Ukraine charged the four men in absentia with war crimes. Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The Ukrainian investigators wanted some accountability for the attack, whose youngest victims were the same ages as their own children. They hope to see the men in The Hague someday.
This case was almost done, but their work was unrelenting. Every day, more missiles and drones slammed into cities across Ukraine. Civilians kept dying, and war crimes accumulated in the thousands. Unmarked vans shuttled weapon fragments to regional forensics labs for analysis, then onward to storage. In the graveyards of metal were dark-bellied Shaheds, bulky Kinzhals and smooth-nosed Iskanders. Foreign components were ghosts in their midst.
Satellite data and public records showed the expansion of the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, where Iskanders are mass-produced. New workshops, thousands of additional workers. Production tripled from 2022 to 2025.
The plant now averages about 60 to 70 new Iskanders per month, said aviation expert and military analyst Kostiantyn Kryvolap, a former test engineer at the Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv. The Iskander’s accuracy and ability to evade air defense remain dependent on Western components, which Russia has not managed to replace with its own parts, he said.
By late 2025, the Kremlin was launching 12 times more Iskanders than in 2023. The volume of Shahed drones increased 20 times over in the same two-year period.
“To counter Iskanders, you have to start with the Votkinsk plant,” Kryvolap said.
The 83 shards of the playground missile remained in storage until late November. Then they were brought to an unmarked SBU building in eastern Ukraine. Double-bagged to prevent the metal from ripping through, the nearly 200-pound sack was maneuvered by two men into the basement, where the investigators were waiting. With each step, the metal clanked.
Cold and oily to the touch, some pieces were as small as a pencil eraser. Others were as big as a bowling ball.
“Just imagine, one piece going at the speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour, what happens to a person struck,” one of the investigators said, palming a fragment. “Even a piece so small, it’s done.”
A slip of paper with a number was all that identified the bag.
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Any other boy
Winter was descending again, the year coming to a close. Anastasia took her brother’s good hand, walking Matviy home from soccer practice through streets darkened by power cuts. On his other side was his dad.
The empty sleeve of Matviy’s coat was tucked into his pocket so it might resemble an arm. As the headlights of passing cars sent their shadows long then short, he looked like any other boy.
But he never would be.
He had lost so much to the war. Some losses the world could see, like a missing limb and mother, and others it couldn’t. His childhood. His security. His sense of safety.
He still doesn’t like answering questions about that day on the playground or what remains of his left arm, which he named “Dragon.” Though he is sensitive to people staring, he prefers not to wear his prosthesis, which pinches following his latest growth spurt. Soon, he’ll return to Lviv to get a new one.
He’s been forced to learn to accept the help of others. His dad joins him in the musty locker room before soccer practice to help shimmy on his jersey. At school, when the air raid sirens blare, his classmates help him race from their third-floor classroom into the shelter. At home, Anastasia has moved in with her toddler to provide extra support.
The trio walked on, the sleeve slipping from Matviy’s pocket and hanging loosely. Somewhere up ahead was the playground where he and the other children used to play a game called “catch the missile,” lobbing a toy in the air and hoping it wouldn’t land.
He no longer plays there.
In moments when he feels overwhelmed, Matviy disappears online into coding or the virtual world of Roblox. He is saving up for special gear to protect him from the game’s monster. Here, at least, he’ll be safe.