Huddled under a blanket, Iryna Babii turned away from the empty space where, until Friday, nine floors of apartments had been stacked, one of them home to her daughter’s best friend.
The apartments were obliterated when a Russian missile crashed into this residential block, which sits beside a school in a neighbourhood just near the botanical gardens of Uman, a central Ukrainian city that before the war was known mostly as a Jewish pilgrimage site.
“There was a whistling sound, then a very loud explosion. My child was thrown across the room and the windows were blown in. Our aquarium burst, so there was water and fish across the floor,” said Babii.
“Flames from the missile seemed to reach across the courtyard. I thought my own apartment was on fire. I just grabbed my daughter and ran down the stairs. Outside there was a woman screaming in a voice that didn’t seem human: ‘There are children in there, there are children in there.’”
The strike killed 23 people, including a baby boy, and injured nine more. It would have been inexplicable were it not for the fact that Russian forces have for years directed attacks on civilians as a weapon of war.
To the military that bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, and tried to freeze Ukrainians from their homes this winter, these Soviet-era apartments might have looked like a convenient target.
If the aim is terrorising a whole country, destroying these ordinary blocks overlooking a courtyard where tulips are about to burst into bloom may have a twisted logic. When there is no obvious reason why a place is targeted for a missile strike, Ukrainians are forced to understand that one could come anywhere.
“Fifty metres from here there is a school, and two kindergartens. Really ‘strategic objectives’,” said one of Babii’s workmates at a local museum, who had come to give her moral support, mixing grief for the dead with anger at the attack.
Uman is in the Cherkasy region, on the west side of the Dnipro river, far from any of the frontlines. The attack was the deadliest there since Russia invaded.
“I wasn’t sure if I was dead or alive, it was such a great shock,” said Svitlana Bondar, whose home is also across the courtyard from the obliterated apartments. “The blast wave was so strong I felt it knocked me out of reality.”
Strikes like this are one reason why many Ukrainians have fled even peaceful parts of the country. Missile fragments from the same Friday morning raid that targeted Uman also killed a young girl and her mother on the outskirts of Dnipro city, in a rural area they moved to for safety after a similar missile strike on an apartment block there.
Those who have stayed in their homes are now both stoic and grimly proficient at dealing with the aftermath of the extreme violence of modern warfare.
By late afternoon on Friday, barely 12 hours after the missile struck, the pile of crumbled apartment wreckage had been largely sorted, all but one of the crushed bodies taken to the morgue, and a digger was combing through the basement.
Neighbourhood pathways had been swept clear of broken glass, and empty window frames in other buildings filled with plastic sheeting. The police had set up a DNA testing centre, to identify badly damaged remains.
“Classroom six at the school for giving DNA samples,” a police officer with a loudhailer told the crowd that had gathered in the courtyard to mourn, or perhaps just to try to understand their losses.
Some arrived with flowers for the dead, although one woman with red carnations struggled to find a place for her tribute in an area busy with disaster professionals, trying to attend to the needs of the injured and the dead, survivors and relatives, people evacuated from their homes and those haunted by the missile.
“I have a neighbour whose child is refusing to go to sleep, because every time she closes her eyes, she says she sees the flames in front of her eyes again,” said Babii.
Ruslan Bondarenko, who has been supporting disaster survivors for 10 years, said the missile attack was the worst tragedy he had ever attended in Cherkasy. “Now we are in a state of war. People died [in accidents] before, but not like this.”
The World Food Kitchen nonprofit provided meals, the Red Cross mixed with medics, firefighters and police. There were tents to shelter survivors, piles of clothes neatly sorted in the school and bags of food, although Svitlana, one of the volunteers organising the donations, said no one was taking much.
“Today the survivors don’t want anything. They just come here and cry,” she said, folding men’s clothes and clean sheets into piles.
For all the community support, those who have lost a loved one are ultimately alone with their grief, trapped in the moment when the tragedy of Russia’s invasion became intensely personal.
In the dark corridor outside classroom six, Yevhenia was waiting for her husband to give a genetic sample. Her brother-in-law Yaroslav, 28 and his wife, Svitlana, 32, were in one of the apartments that was obliterated.
“I have no words. We still can’t believe this has happened,” she said. “We think it’s a nightmare, and we hope to wake up.”
