Little hope of survivors
The search for victims begins in Borodyanka
4/9/2022, 8:09 p.m
After the atrocities committed in Bucha became public, a hotbed of cruelty also appeared in Borodjanka: the extent of the destruction was gigantic. The city is recaptured by Ukrainian troops at the end of March. Rescue services are now beginning the first rescue work.
Eyes red with tiredness and red from crying, Antonina watches immobile as the excavator digs through the rubble of a building in Borodyanka. On the evening of March 1, the Russian air force dropped a bomb over the three-part apartment block in the small Ukrainian town. Since then, she has not heard from her 43-year-old son, Yuri, who lived on the third floor of the house. “Maybe he managed to get out,” says Antonina. Maybe he was injured under the rubble. “I can’t say, I don’t know,” she adds, breaking down in tears. For the 65-year-old, the waiting and the uncertainty are unbearable.
Before the war, almost 13,000 people lived in the small town northwest of Kyiv. But Borodyanka was largely destroyed by the Russian bombing raids. Nothing is where it should be anymore. The extent of the devastation is overwhelming. Some houses just aren’t there anymore. At the end of March, Ukrainian troops were able to recapture Borodyanka and the surrounding region from the Russians.
Zelenskyi: The situation is devastating
The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj described the situation in the small town after the withdrawal of the Russian troops as devastating. It is even “much more terrible” than in Bucha, where numerous bodies of shot civilians were found after the Russian soldiers withdrew. How many people died in Borodyanka is still unclear. Attorney General Iryna Venediktova recently said that 27 bodies were recovered from the rubble of two blocks of flats alone. The salvage work has only just begun, first explosives disposal teams had to secure the area.
Antonina sits alone between rubble and ruins on a chair in what used to be a small garden behind her son’s house. Her chin resting on her hands, which hold a stick, she watches sadly as rescue workers use heavy construction machinery to lift sections of the wall and move the rubble away. The middle part of the building is just a gaping hole, and in a fraction of a second ten apartments were razed to the ground. Only broken concrete and bent metal parts remained. “People in the two outer blocks of the building were injured but survived,” she says. Everyone in the middle part is dead.
Little hope of survivors
Scattered among the remains of the house are shoes, a book, a water gun, and stuffed animals. A mattress hangs over the branch of a tree. Lyubov Yaremenko places a brown sofa on what used to be her small balcony on the ground floor of one of the two side parts. She protects it from the approaching rain with a plastic sheet. It’s almost the only piece of furniture she has left.
Inside her apartment there is pure devastation. The force of the bomb blew doors off their hinges, windows shattered, cupboards fell over, and clothing littered the floor. Yaremenko was in the basement of the house at the time of the attack. “We were in the basement for so long, almost a month and a half,” she says.
Just across Borodyanka’s main square, two firefighters are searching the remains of another eight-story house. In search of victims, they climb a fire escape directly over the torn, smoke-black facade into the destroyed apartments. “We would like this to be a rescue operation,” says Svetlana Vodolaha from the Kiev rescue service in Borodyanka. But the bombings had already been in late February or early March. The hope of survivors is close to zero.