Three days after a Russian S-300 missile slammed into the roof of her apartment block in the small hours of Sunday morning, Iryna Davydiuk was improbably hanging out the washing on what was left of the balcony of her apartment. It was a generously warm late October afternoon in the southern port city of Mykolaiv, but on the terrace below her lay a large concrete block and copious amounts of rubble.
Fortunately, Davydiuk, 48, had decided to shelter with relatives in the countryside over the weekend and so avoided the night-time impact. When she returned on Monday morning, she was stunned to find the widespread damage to her family home. “I couldn’t understand why, what for,” she said. “Why did they do this? We were just peacefully living our lives. Why did this happen?”
