'Helpless Feeling': MN Native Killed In Ukraine Documented War

Mahtomedi, Minnesota native Jimmy Hill was gathering food for hospital patients in Ukraine when he was killed during a Russian attack Thursday. He died when Russian soldiers began shelling the city of Chernihiv, which is located about 90 miles north of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv.

Hill, 65, posted regular updates about his experience during the war on his Facebook over the past two weeks.

"Chernihiv could be heavily bombed tonight," Hill wrote on March 9. "I am ordered in bunker."

"Power out cold inside hospital staff doing well some food siege here Ukraine army heroes in defending city," he wrote on March 11. "Bombing throughout day. Helpless feeling."

On top of everything else, Hill was taking care of his sick partner, a Ukrainian woman named Ira who was too sick to leave.

"Ira has had orevus," Hill said March 13. "She is alert but we are all a bit depressed. "We all want to get out of here," he added.

"We are hanging in there," he said on March 14. "Very cold inside. Food portions are reduced. Bombing and explosions most of the night. Hard to sleep. People getting depressed."

Hill posted two updates from the day he died:

"Not allowed to take photos. Spies throughout city," he wrote. "Bombing has intensified."

"Intense bombing! Still alive. Limited food," Hill wrote in the final update before his death.

Hill graduated from Mahtomedi High School in 1973. He psychologist and lecturer who had been working in Europe for many years, the Star Tribune reported.

"Every day, the hospital rations were fewer and fewer," Cheryl Hill Gordon, Hill's sister, told the newspaper. "And Jim goes out to find food for everyone in the hospital. He was a wonderful human being. Very compassionate and humanitarian."

Nearly 6.5 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine, according to the United Nations. The death toll among civilians and soldiers is in the thousands, but the exact number is unknown.

Reporting from the Associated Press was used in this story.