The violence in eastern Ukraine is escalating with a scale not seen since the 2014 ceasefire. The Russian-backed separatists have been attacking Ukrainian cities and towns, provoking ever greater military response from Kiev government forces
Yulia Zhdanova and her boys hurried up from the cellar after the bombs stopped falling on Chernihiv, Ukraine, and consumed a pot of cold vegetable soup with grubby hands. The phone of Ms. Zhdanova then alerted her to another air attack.
When the explosions ripped out doors and windows, the 39-year-old English teacher and her boys rushed into a corridor and struck the floor, shielding their ears.
“Everyone get out swiftly!” yelled a guy. They dashed outdoors to see a carnage scene and the sound of an air-raid alarm. As she hurried by three dead, a lady yelled, “Children!” in terror. With naked feet, one lay still. Another lacked legs, while a third moved sluggishly and lacked a right foot.
“Shock is your initial response. You’re taken aback. Ms. Zhdanova said, “Your mind rejects it.” “You see it with your eyes, as if it were a camera, as if you aren’t a person.” After five or ten minutes, you realize how frightening it is and begin to tremble, shake, and scream.”
During the March 3 attack on Chernihiv, a city of around 290,000 inhabitants, more than 47 people died. It was one of the worst attacks since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his soldiers, signaling a change in his military’s strategy. After Moscow’s rapid victory strategy failed, Russian soldiers resorted to a tactic used elsewhere under Mr. Putin’s almost two-decade rule: bludgeoning civilians.
According to Ukrainian authorities, thousands of civilians have been murdered throughout the nation since the assault began last month. According to local police, victims were recovered from the ruins for days after the Chernihiv invasion. The city is straining to keep track of how many citizens have died.
The Russian strikes destroyed one of Chernihiv’s residential structures.
Getty Images/dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse
Russian soldiers seem to be aiming to surround cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv in the east, and Chernihiv, although being slowed by Ukrainian army fortifications. They’re ramping up the bombardment, which has knocked off power and cut off food supply.
Russia claims to be attacking Ukraine’s military rather than people. Opposite to popular belief, there is evidence to the contrary. “They know where they’re striking,” Chernihiv City Council Secretary Oleksandr Lomako remarked. “They seek to frighten,” says the narrator.
Chernihiv’s devastation
On March 3, a number of places were bombed.
Apartment complexes
bombings have caused damage
Regional Chernihiv
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Apartment complexes
bombings have caused damage
Regional Chernihiv
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Apartment complexes
bombings have caused damage
Regional Chernihiv
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Schools, kindergartens, hospitals, and residential structures throughout the nation have been bombed out, echoing Mr. Putin’s air and artillery bombardments of Chechnya and Syria. In Chernihiv, residents link Russia’s airstrikes to the city’s bombardment by the Nazis in August 1941.
“The Russians attack us in the same manner they bombed us eighty-one years ago,” Chernihiv Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko remarked. “Civilians are being annihilated.”
We are under siege.
Chernihiv, which is about 50 miles from the point where the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia meet, saw war break out swiftly.
Russian armored battalions slammed into Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, but encountered stiff opposition in and around Chernihiv, a primarily Russian-speaking city. Unarmed locals attempted to obstruct the armored columns while cursing at the troops in Russian. Several tanks attempting to breach into the city were damaged or seized by Ukraine’s army.
Thousands of locals, young and old, joined the territorial-defense brigade, taking up guns and putting up dozens of checkpoints on the streets. Public facilities, such as School No. 18 at the city’s west end, became assistance and defense coordination hubs.
The Russians bombarded residential structures in the suburbs and the city center after being thwarted on the outskirts of Chernihiv, according to local authorities.
On March 3, Russian strikes in Chernihiv severely destroyed a school building, killing at least 47 people.
Getty Images/dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse
Chernihiv is notable for its churches, public squares, and parks, which date back over a millennium. Ms. Zhdanova, who manages a network of educational facilities where children may study everything from foreign languages to chess, said that Ukrainian and international visitors were attracted to “our tranquil, European, nice-looking city.”
A children’s dental clinic and youth center situated in a former movie theater erected in the 1930s were destroyed by shelling in downtown Chernihiv on February 27. Ms. Zhdanova said, “They bomb whatever they see.”
Residents have become used to their new way of life, scurrying to their basements when air-raid sirens sound or when authorities issue social media alerts. They added beds, chairs, and mounds of blankets to make the hiding spots as pleasant as possible.
After an air-raid alarm, Yulia Zhdanova and one of her children took refuge in the basement of their Chernihiv apartment building.
Yulia Zhdanova (photo)
Warnings to seek shelter became so frequent that some individuals chose to disregard them. Others were either too elderly or unwilling to rush down stairs to basements. Some people lingered at stores and pharmacies, refusing to give up their places in line.
Ms. Zhdanova, her husband, and their two sons, aged 11 and 13, mostly remained in their apartment building’s basement, only coming home to eat the soups she cooked in between bombardments. Their flat was on Chornovola Street, a popular central area with grocery shops, a pizzeria, and a beauty salon.
In the face of adversity, the community banded together. The 174-year-old regional newspaper’s head editor, Christina Lavryshcheva-Novikova, published an issue with her team working in basements. Food and medication were sent by Oleksandr Salva, a 33-year-old entrepreneur. A Belgian brewer’s employee, Yaroslav Yachnyi, brought coffee and biscuits to the guys at a nearby checkpoint. Ms. Zhdanova’s husband joined the unarmed patrol of his building.
cries for assistance
On March 3, the city saw a rare respite from air-raid alerts in the late morning.
Ms. Lavryshcheva-Novikova left her kid with his grandma to go to the market. She drove by a roadblock and waved to the territorial-battalion troops stationed there. She remembered their being a queue outside the drugstore.
The instructor, Ms. Zhdanova, and her boys walked upstairs for soup. They ate it straight from the saucepan without heating it or using plates or utensils. She happened to look at her phone and saw an air-raid alert, so she rushed her sons down the hallway.
When the alarm rang, Mr. Yachnyi was getting eggs, frozen dumplings, and beef from his apartment. He and his two companions paused before proceeding to the basement. They observed a warplane flying in from the west, dropping bombs, and leapt into the hallway out the window.
Yaroslav Yachnyi sought refuge in a Chernihiv basement.
Yaroslav Yachnyi (photo)
A dashboard camera saw three bombs falling from the sky and exploding with a flash around 12:16 p.m., followed by clouds of smoke and debris. Mr. Yachnyi’s apartment’s doors and windows were blown out by the explosion, showering him with concrete and dust. “Is everyone still alive?” he inquired.
He noticed sunshine through the hole where his neighbor’s door used to be. The residential unit had been blasted to bits.
Ms. Zhdanova and her two boys dashed outdoors, where her husband was on duty. He rushed to an adjacent building where his parents resided after seeing his wife and boys unharmed. On his phone, he captured the scene: orange flames, wrecked automobiles and rubble, everything coated in a coating of brown-gray concrete dust.
“A f—ing drugstore!” he shouted, pointing the camera at the single-story building’s burnt facade. People rushed in all directions, rushing past the remains of those who had fallen.
“No socks,” muttered a gunman, staring at the first corpse before speeding away.
The newspaper editor, Ms. Lavryshcheva-Novikova, rushed to her apartment building. “Where is my son?” cried a bleeding mother as she emerged from the entryway. “Where has my kid gone?” Ms. Lavryshcheva-Novikova returned home to find her flat blasted to bits, but her family was unharmed.
People were transported to a nearby hospital, which had also been damaged in the assault, using fire vehicles, ambulances, and members of the territorial-defense unit.
The mayor, Mr. Atroshenko, said that there had been no military objectives in the area. “The aircraft was flying low, it was midday, and it was pretty obvious that it was a residential neighborhood,” he said.
Mr. Salva, who had taken refuge near School No. 18, rushed to the school to provide assistance. It had been damaged by a bomb, which had left a hole and a mound of bricks in the corner. He saw a head, arm, and leg jutting out from behind a concrete slab, as well as a man’s cries for assistance. The slab was lifted off the victim by Mr. Salva and a dozen or so others. A door was utilized as a stretcher.
Another guy was groaning behind several slabs, but rescuers were unable to dislodge the pile. A third guy dangled limp from the second level, head-first.
Authorities had tallied 47 dead from airstrikes before dawn, and there would be more in the days to come. According to Mr. Lomako, the local council secretary, the Russians seek to crush the Ukrainian spirit. “Instead, rage is on the rise.”
Ms. Lavryshcheva-Novikova, a former Soviet fighter pilot’s ethnic Russian daughter, fled Chernihiv a few days later. “I am a proud citizen of my nation.” We had such a good time. “Then came the Russian world,” she said. “Where is an officer’s honor when he unleashes bombs on civilians?”
After Russian strikes on residential areas, schools, and other facilities, a Chernihiv resident stands in front of his burning home.
Getty Images/dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse
“I feel humiliated to be Russian,” Ms. Lavryshcheva-Novikova told her priest before leaving the city.
Officials and civilians said that bombing and shelling have increased since then, trapping people mostly in cellars. More than 50 infants, including two sets of triplets, were delivered in the basement of one of Chernihiv’s maternity facilities.
Because the city depends only on hospital statistics, the mayor said it’s impossible to determine the entire number of fatalities, but he thinks it’s in the hundreds. Prosecutors in charge of official death statistics are at the morgue, scribbling down the names of the deceased on note pads.
Because the municipal cemetery is in the middle of a conflict with Russian troops, the deceased are buried at an ancient cemetery in the woods, in backhoe-dug pits. They are buried in ten similar wooden caskets in rows. Their names are written on a placard that will be placed in a cemetery for reburial. Volunteers assist municipal employees in excavating and moving caskets.
Officials and locals say even minor routes in and out of Chernihiv are now inaccessible. According to local reports, Russian soldiers opened fire on fleeing people on Friday, killing at least two.
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The city’s social media messages include requests for information on the missing, aid evacuating residents, and assistance delivering food and drugs, which are in limited supply.
One of Yulia Zhdanova’s children rests in Vinnytsia, a place where the family stopped on their way to western Ukraine.
Yulia Zhdanova (photo)
According to local authorities, the Russians are targeting infrastructure, causing heating, power, and water to go out.
Mr. Salva, a businessman, relocated his family to western Ukraine at the onset of the crisis, but claimed he intended to remain in Chernihiv. “Would you simply leave if someone came into your house and did this to you?” he said.
Ms. Zhdanova claimed she departed Chernihiv “weeping and praying.” Her family was driving down a little rural road that had been warned by authorities may be mined. They just took two suitcases.
“Those two suitcases contain our whole lives,” she said. “However, it makes no difference. The fact that you are alive is all that counts.”
—This article was co-written by Oksana Grytsenko.
James Marson can be reached at [email protected]
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