In house 357 on Tsentralna Borodyanka Street, on April 14, Julia Prudius and her husband watched the excavation of the bodies of her family who died after the bombing of Ukraine.
Julia Prudius watched in silence as an excavator dug up the broken cement that had once been a nine-story apartment building at 357 Central Street in Borodyanka, a city northwest of Kyiv.
Mrs. Prudius knew that five of her relatives were lying dead under the rubble buried in the basement of the building, which had failed to protect them from a direct Russian air strike. “My mother, my brother, his wife and her parents are inside,” she said softly with tears in her eyes as she watched the machine pull the wreckage for the ninth day in a row.
Rescuers have found 20 bodies from below 357 Central, but so far none of them have been missing members of Mrs. Prudius’ family. On Friday afternoon, the six most recently recovered victims were laid in black sacks at the foot of the building as a sobbing woman examined each.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Central Street was the place where people came to shop, bank and dine in this working class 90 minutes by car from the Ukrainian capital.
After a month of Russian occupation, Central Street is a 4.7-kilometer stretch of misery. It is a landscape of bullet-ridden family homes, burned shops and entire apartment buildings turned into ruins. This is a place that is still struggling, two weeks after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kyiv region, to count the dead. The smell of burns hangs over the whole city.
Ukrainian authorities say Borodyanka, which had a population of 13,000 before the war, is the most devastated place Ukraine has regained control of since Russia’s withdrawal. Ukrainian leaders and international visitors see the ruined city as a gigantic crime scene – evidence, along with mass graves found in the nearby town of Bucha, of what appears to be war crimes committed by the Russian military against Ukrainian civilians.
The invading troops seem to have placed special emphasis on destruction of symbols of Ukrainian culture and statehood. The specialized music school in the city is reduced to a pile of red bricks and twisted metal. A marble monument to Ukrainian soldiers has been broken into three parts. A giant bronze bust of Taras Shevchenko, the most beloved Ukrainian poet, was shot in the temple style of execution.
In an attempt to understand the scale of what happened in Borodyanka, The Globe and Mail spoke to dozens of residents on Central Street this week, collecting stories about what they and their neighbors have affected. According to their testimonies, at least 60 civilians died on this street alone during the month Borodyanka was under Russian military control. This number is almost certainly a significant understatement.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky, said during a visit to Borodyanka that it was impossible to say how many people had died here, as hundreds are still unknown.
It is believed that many of them are buried under four apartment blocks on Central Street: buildings numbered 353, 357, 371 and 429. “There is no explanation why this and that and not that,” said Mr. Gerashchenko, pointing out to number 355, which continues to stand between its two demolished neighbors.
On 357 Tsentralna Street, rescuers are checking for bodies among excavated debris. ANTON SKYBA / Globe and Post Office
This week, rescuers continued digging into the underground shelters of the buildings. They could only estimate how many bodies there might be inside. There is no hope of finding survivors six weeks after the airstrikes destroyed the apartment buildings.
During the month of pain on Central Street, death sometimes came suddenly to whole families at once. In other cases, the victims were found dead only after the Russian troops left. In some cases, it was not clear how and when the residents died.
What makes the senseless violence against Borodyanka particularly confusing is that the city has no visible military value. The nearby suburbs of Kyiv, Bucha and Irpin, were the scene of heavy fighting as Russian troops tried to seize the capital before Moscow suddenly changed its strategy and redeployed its offensive forces in the east. Hostomel, another badly damaged city, was targeted for its strategic airport.
Borodyanka, meanwhile, appears to have been shot at random. Residents say the first Russian military convoy met with almost no resistance when it entered the city on February 26th. A second column, which entered on February 27, was met with Ukrainian fire, but the fighting ended quickly.
Mark McKinnon of the Globe reports from Borodyanka, one of the cities near Kyiv most affected by the Russian attacks. Interviews with survivors show that at least 65 were killed on just one street, with hundreds still unaccounted for after the withdrawal of Russian forces.
The globe and the mail
After that, the Russian forces in Borodyanka found themselves on the edge. They had lost comrades. Destroyed Russian armored personnel carrier crashes awkwardly into the ruins of a hardware store on 307 Central. A discarded Russian military uniform lies in a small pile of rubbish next to the building.
Residents say that on February 28, a convoy of Russian armored vehicles moved through Central, firing randomly at homes that were largely empty, as most residents had remained in their underground shelters since the first appearance of Russian troops.
The airstrikes on apartment blocks took place on March 1st and 2nd as Russian forces escalated shelling of civilian areas of cities around Ukraine.
No one who lived on Central Street escaped unscathed. For most of the way, it is rare to see a home that has not been hit by a firearm or worse. Even if their homes were spared, residents had to survive on dwindling food, water and electricity and endure humiliating harassment by the occupying army. Almost every home seems to have been robbed of food, alcohol, electronics and anything else that the invading soldiers think could be of value.
Numbers 1 and 1a Central, at the eastern end of Borodyanka, are the neighboring homes of Tatiana and Alexander Makienko, a couple with children, and Lydia Maksyuta, a grandmother. They survived the first days of the occupation, hiding with 800 other locals in a psychiatric home for a short walk.
At 1 Tsentralna Street, Lydia Maksyuta, who is sitting on the sofa in her living room. Anton Skyba / Globe and Mail
At one point, Mr Makienko was allowed to return home to collect some belongings. But the first Russian forces did stripped naked in the street to prove he had no weapons and no military tattoos. He entered the house to find that he had been robbed by Russian soldiers who apparently lived there.
“They told us that we came here to release you,” Mr Makienko said. “They also said that we have very good living conditions. So they took all our things. “
Their situation at the nursing home deteriorated when the facility was taken over by a detachment of Chechen fighters, a battle-torn region in southern Russia led by military leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The 80 fighters – led by Colonel Daniil Martinov, one of Mr Kadyrov’s most feared commanders – took control of food and water supplies, leaving only a trickle for civilians hiding in the building, and told no one not allowed to leave. “We were hostages,” said Alla Krivoshenko, deputy director of the nursing home.
She said Chechens had tried to force director Marina Hanitska to record a video thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for Borodyanka’s “release”, but she refused. “When she came back to us, she fainted. She was really stressed because until the last moment she thought she would be shot, “said Ms. Krivoshenko.
Further west down Central, a field of debris, including a refrigerator with a blown door and a pair of jeans hanging uncomfortably on a nearby fence post, is all that’s left of house number 30 and the six people who lived inside. Four generations of the Simoroz family – from 80-year-old Nina to her great-granddaughter of a year and a half Paulina – died in an air strike or artillery shell at the home on February 26.
A house on Central Street 30 was destroyed by a powerful explosion that killed six people. Anton Skyba / Globe and e-mail
The only survivor of the family is Paulina’s father, Ivan, a local police officer who was driving to their home when he was hit. He arrived on the scene of horror: the dead family members were scattered around their property and a neighbor. Until the arrival of Ivan, only little Paulina was alive, but although he took her straight to the hospital, she died minutes later. “The doctors said there was no chance,” Ivan said.
The legless body of Ivan Petya’s 18-year-old brother flew over a fence in the yard of house number 32, where Valentina Orlova lives alone. The 68-year-old retired nurse said Russian soldiers later broke into her home and stole clothes and food. House number 34, where Ms. Orlova’s sister lives, was severely damaged by a tank shell in a separate attack on February 27th. “One of the Russians told me, ‘We were ordered to destroy you as a nation,'” she recalled. “I do not know what to call them. They are worse than the fascists. They are barbarians. “
A short walk down the street, no one knows how Anatoly Kholoborodko died. Russian troops called his neighbors at 90 Central in mid-March and told them to bury the 60-year-old architect, who lived alone. “He was covered in blood, but the Russians did not tell us what happened,” said Mikhail Romanenko, one of the three neighbors who wrapped Mr Holoborodko in …
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