‘It was 5am,” says Veronika Rakitina, “and I woke up to the sound of a bomb. I looked at the news and the first thing I saw was a burning church next to my parents’ house in Kharkiv.” The Ukrainian dancer is remembering the morning of the Russian invasion. On her phone, she pulls up a photo of a four-storey building with its top two floors blown out. “And here,” she says, pointing to the first floor, “is my grandparents’ apartment. They were inside – they were just lucky.”
Rakitina’s husband, fellow dancer Vladyslav Detiuchenko, travelled from Kyiv to his parents in Kremenchuk, where the Russians bombed a shopping mall 200 metres from their home. “In the house now there are no windows,” he says. “Me and my brother saw the rocket. We heard the explosion and got down on the floor – then we just started running.”
