His mother, Yulia Nesterenko, was happy to encourage the habit. “We even had a basketball hoop at home,” the 33-year-old told CNN as she described their first family home. It was their “nest,” she said, with a small garden and a vegetable garden.
It was time to “get out of the occupied territories to a safe place … to survive,” Julia said. The Russians have taken over their village of Verkhniy Rohachik and the Nesterenko family fears the consequences.
With nothing more than a backpack and important documents, the family took the easiest route to Ukrainian regions, she said. On April 7, a family of three and 11 others boarded an evacuation boat driven by a local man, crossing the Dnieper River from the southern, Russian-occupied Kherson region to Ukrainian-controlled territory on the other side of the river. The Dnieper, one of the longest waterways in Europe, crosses Ukraine and its Kherson region before flowing into the Black Sea.
The boat trip, which began on the shores of the fishing village of Pervomaivka, had to be simple. This was the seventh boat evacuation trip from the village to the Ukrainian region on the northern bank of the Dnieper River since the start of the war, according to Alexander Vilkul, head of the Krivoy Rog military administration in the neighboring Dnepropetrovsk region.
Instead, it became a bloodbath, according to Julia, two other survivors, a friend of a victim and several regional officials. They described how Russian missiles and a shot were aimed at the boat after it inadvertently flew to the front line.
Roman Shelest, head of the Eastern District Prosecutor’s Office of Krivoy Rog for Ukraine, told CNN that the boat deviated from the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces and was fired on 70 meters from the shore.
A survivor, who declined to be named due to safety concerns, explained that the boat was lost in a smokescreen believed to have been created by the Russians. CNN was unable to independently verify this claim.
“This shooting was done with the help of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher system, probably” City “, but we (only) could say the exact type of weapon only after the (investigation) is over,” Shelest added.
One of the survivors also said he believed they had been hit by Russian Grad missiles.
When the boat’s navigator indicated that the group had come close to the Russian-controlled village of Osokorivka, the morning silence was soon broken by the sounds of exploding rockets, survivors said.
Vladimir slipped into Julia’s hands, bleeding. “My husband behind me also fell on me when he was shot in the head,” Julia told CNN in a soft, monotonous voice, as if devoid of emotion after everything she lost during that trip.
Four people were killed in the attack that day. Oleh was among the three who perished on the boat; Vladimir died shortly afterwards in hospital. Another victim is a lawyer who traveled to the Kherson region to save his son and deliver humanitarian aid, the lawyer’s friend Tatiana Denisenko told CNN.
Photos of the aftermath of the attack showed what looked like the wreckage of a rocket on shore, as well as bullet holes and shrapnel in the hull of the boat.
“Based on the shells and ammunition we saw in the area and on the coastline, we could see the direction of the shooting – which shows that (they) are coming from the south, and this is the territory occupied at that time and under the control of the armed forces. forces of the Russian Federation, “prosecutor Shelest, who is investigating the attack, told CNN.
CNN turned to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment. Since the outbreak of the war, Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, a claim refuted by attacks on civilian and civilian targets, which have been confirmed by CNN and other news organizations.
Kherson in crisis
The Nesterenko family is just one of many in Ukraine whose lives have been uprooted or destroyed by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the country. More than 7.1 million people have been internally displaced, according to UN agencies, with nearly two-thirds of children in Ukraine leaving their homes in the past six weeks. At least 191 children have been killed and more than 349 injured since the Russian invasion, according to Ukraine on Wednesday.
Kherson was one of the first cities that the Russians conquered. Mayor Igor Kolikhayev said people were “actively” leaving Kherson and other cities in Russia’s predominantly southern region after atrocities erupted in the Kyiv region following the Kremlin’s hasty withdrawal from northern Ukraine.
“Cities are becoming empty,” he said on Tuesday as Russia shifted its offensive to eastern Ukraine. “It hurts a lot when people leave Kherson. “When they (leave) their homes, people will never return home,” he said.
There are growing rumors that a referendum will be held in the Russian-controlled areas of Kherson, especially in the areas on the left bank of the Dnieper River, in an attempt to legitimize the illegal Russian seizure. A similar tactic took place in eastern Ukraine in 2014, where pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk held referendums on forming “people’s republics” in a vote that was rejected by Ukraine and Western countries as false.
Ukrainians living on the left bank of the region have peacefully resisted the Russian occupation with rallies in Kherson and Kolikhayev, the mayor said on Tuesday. At a previous rally in Kherson, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky accused Russian forces of shooting at unarmed people. “Russian soldiers don’t even know what it’s like to be free,” Oleh Baturin, a reporter for the local newspaper Novi Den, who recently left the region, told CNN.
On the right bank of the Dnieper in Kherson Baturin describes a “tragic situation” that reflects the destruction carried out around the Kiev region. People living in villages bordering the front lines in the Nikolaev and Dnepropetrovsk regions told him he had been robbed, beaten and threatened by Russian forces, he said.
“For example, Kochubeevka, Novovorontsovka (where Osokorivka is located) and the settlements of Visokopilya – there are villages that disappeared in the first half of March and were completely looted and destroyed,” he said.
Only when the Russians leave will the complete horror of the occupation manifest itself, Baturin predicts.
Broken lives
Three survivors described the trauma of the boat attack last week in interviews with CNN.
“It was so sudden, everyone was in shock,” one survivor told CNN. When the missiles hit the area, fragments began hitting passengers, he said.
The survivor said he was spared injury as he fell from the boat in the early moments of the bombing. “I wore boots so heavy that I was immediately dragged to the bottom (of the river). “Then we heard that (rockets) were being dumped,” he said.
They had sunk into an active front line embracing the northern shore around the village of Osokorivka. Ukrainian soldiers began shouting from the riverbank, dropping their weapons on the ground and wading into the water to retrieve the boat and civilians, the survivor said. It took up to 15 minutes to get them out of the water around Novovorontsovka. CNN is geolocating photos of the consequences of this coastline.
“Our boys (Ukrainian military) helped, of course … to rush into the water and swim to the boat,” pulling the boat ashore, the survivor said.
Julia said the shock of the moment and the subsequent trauma meant that her memory of the event was blurred. “I don’t know why we were shot at. We didn’t understand what the sounds were: bullets, shelling, explosions?” she said. “And I didn’t understand what was going on – I was just in a fog.”
She remembers soldiers carrying her husband’s body and “putting it on the beach.” Her son Vladimir is still alive, but badly injured. “He was breathing, he had a serious head injury (and he lost a lot of blood. We took him 40 kilometers to the nearest hospital,” she said. “He had surgery. There was still hope that they could save him. But as the doctors later said, ‘it was a life-threatening injury.’
Maxim Kolomiets, the big 37-year-old craftsman, took the boat so he could leave the region and join the Ukrainian army. He was unconscious in the first moments of the shooting after waking up hours later in hospital with a shrapnel wound to his left arm.
A day after the April 8 attack, Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, described the shelling of the boat as a “war crime and a crime against humanity” in a Facebook post. Speaking to CNN, Vilkul, head of the Krivoy Rog military administration, said the Russians were “doing everything possible to keep civilians out of the occupied territories.” their positions. ”
Julia now lives with relatives in the Ukrainian region, where she buried her son and husband. She is puzzled as to what to do next.
“We wanted this trip (to be) a chance to escape the occupation … It was like a light at the end of the tunnel for us. Because it was already unbearable for us to be where we were,” she said.
“This war has ruined my family, my life – and the killing of people must stop. Immediately. Because (it is ruining) destinies, lives.”
CNN’s Tara John reports and writes from Lviv. From Lviv announced Alexander Filipov, Sandy Sidhu, Julia Presnyakova. Nathan Hodge, Julia Kesaeva and Olga Voitovich contributed to this piece.
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