The evening of Monday, August 7 was announced to be calm, the city center bathed in the reddish light of a late summer day. But around 7:15 p.m., as Ilya Myrontsev left work and was about to return home after a last walk in the center of Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, a first explosion shattered everything. The 16-year-old boy remembers having had the presence of mind to throw himself to the ground. “If I hadn’t been on the ground, I would surely have been hit by the flying debris,” he explains Tuesday, the day after the Russian attack on the city which had 60,000 pre-war inhabitants. ” I was covered in dust,” he adds. Once relieved, Ilya Myrontsev immediately headed for a shelter to avoid being the victim of a second Russian missile strike.
A few minutes after the first bombardment on a residential building in his courtyard, Ivan, a pensioner, rushed with other neighbors to rescue the injured and extricate them from the rubble of their ravaged apartments. “The first fifteen minutes, there were only us to help them”, remembers the septuagenarian in a shirt, still bewildered by the violence of the explosions in his neighborhood. “Then guys in uniform came, he continues, they started to help people while warning them that they had to take shelter because of the risk of a second strike. »
Around 7:50 p.m., a second Russian missile smashed the Hotel Drujba (“friendship” in Ukrainian), a few meters from the residential building which housed a pizzeria on the ground floor. “I had hidden between cars”, explains Ivan again who, luckily, escaped unscathed. Back at the scene of the bombardment, he discovers that dozens of rescue workers and police officers caught in the explosion are lined up on the ground, injured. “They were evacuating people who were content to live quietly, without bothering anyone,” he blurts out bitterly.
The injured rescuers
Tuesday, the day after the attack on Pokrovsk, the air of the city, some forty kilometers from the front, seemed frozen around the drama. The last searches to evacuate civilians buried under the rubble were completed at the end of the afternoon. In his evening speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported nine dead and eighty-two injured. On this last figure, the head of the military administration of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, counts thirty-one police officers, seven employees of the state emergency service and four soldiers. ” All [les policiers] were there because they were needed, they dedicated their efforts to rescuing people after the first strike,” said Ivan Vyhivskyi, the head of Ukraine’s national police. “They knew that under the rubble there were wounded, they had to react, dig, recover, save. And the enemy deliberately struck the second time. »
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