Often, she says, the air raid sirens only go off only after a missile has hit. Tatiana Drobotia, 32, who helps people at the Palyanytsya volunteer centre patch up those caught up in the blasts, heard all 10 explosions that morning. That is not to say that the people of Zaporizhzhia enter the night with anything but foreboding. You know, there is one old woman I know whose village is under constant shelling, and she sleeps in a shelter in the night in the city centre and then goes back to dig and plant potatoes during the day.” “They are very scared to meet new people, that they will not have money. “You know, 70% of the Zaporizhzhia city’s population have never left the edge of the region,” he says in explanation. Workers in the city suburb of Bombey repair power lines hit by an attack. The reality on the ground, however, is that whether due to incompetence, faulty equipment or malice, they are causing unimaginable misery, citizens say. “It would be a bit chilly,” he says with a chuckle.Ī generous interpretation of the night-time strikes is that the Russians are seeking to avoid civilian casualties. He is being interviewed in a lecture hall at Zaporizhzhia’s National University rather than the council building, as nearly every one of its windows is smashed. That does not stop the Russians from hitting the city with their cruise missiles, and while the whole of Ukraine has endured an escalation of such attacks in the last week, Starukh holds up a graph on his phone showing that the number of hits rose sharply here about three to four weeks ago. The truth is that the frontline in Zaporizhzhia, some 18 miles east of the city centre, has been almost entirely frozen since the beginning of March, cutting the Ukrainian province in half. The region of Zaporizhzhia, and its capital, is one of the four provinces, along with Donetsk and Luhansk to the east and Kherson to its south-west, that were said by Putin to have been annexed into the Russian Federation on 1 October.Ĭlothes blown into a tree by a blast that destroyed a block of flats in Osypenkivsʹkyy Zhytlomasyv. A total of 15 people died in this strike. The trees outside the apartments have a peculiar foliage today: ripped blouses, trousers, skirts and T-shirts catapulted some 20 metres on to their branches from washing lines on the balconies of shattered homes. The grief has put them in an almost trance-like state.īogdan is evidently seeing the pictures unfold in his mind as his mother recounts the awful events. “He was still alive, he was still alive,” says Olga. They tried to pull him out but instead watched as his internal organs spilled out into the dirt. Olga’s husband, Serhiy, 56, was blown by the explosive wave of the blast out of the window of their apartment on the seventh floor.īogdan and Olga, after being freed by neighbours from their apartment, whose front door had been distorted by the heat, ran down and out of the block to where Serhiy was lying at the bottom in a huge crater. Bogdan Govelov and his mother Olga outside their destroyed block of flats in Osypenkivsʹkyy Zhytlomasyv.
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