How do you grieve when there is no body to be found? How do you move forward when the person you loved vanished into the dust in a matter of seconds? These are some of the unthinkable questions many in Kremenchuk are now grappling with after a Russian airstrike obliterated a busy shopping mall.
Many hoped the war would not reach as far as their city. Since the invasion, checkpoints had been erected at the entrance to the town. Air raid sirens wailed occasionally. There had been two strikes, without casualties, on a oil refinery on the outskirts of town. But for the citizens of Kremenchuk, a breezy city on the banks of the Dnipro river in central Ukraine, hundreds of kilometers from the front lines, the town offered them a sense of relative safety.
