Volodymyr Zelenskiy has ordered an audit of all Ukrainian air-raid shelters as a rift widened with Kyiv’s mayor after the deaths of three people who were locked out on the street during a Russian attack.
A nine-year-old girl, her mother and another woman were killed by falling debris after rushing to a Kyiv shelter on Thursday morning and finding it was shut. Later that day, the Ukrainian president accused Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, and other city leaders of negligence. Klitschko responded by saying the responsibility for the tragedy should be shared between them.
“It is the duty of local authorities, a very specific duty, to ensure that shelters are available and accessible around the clock,” Zelenskiy said. “It is painful to see the negligence of this duty. It is painful to see casualties.”
On Friday, Zelenskiy said he had ordered Ukraine’s strategic industries minister and his interior minister to conduct a “full audit of bomb shelters”.
Yaroslav, the husband of the second dead woman, Natalya, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster that the door to the shelter, a clinic in the city’s north-eastern Desnyanskyi district, remained shut after the alarm sounded. “People were knocking, knocking for a very long time. There were women, children, but no one opened it,” he said.
As a result, he said, their daughter had to witness the death of her mother “with her own eyes”. Other people backed up the account, saying the guard responsible had failed to open the door in the short period between the alarm being sounded and the debris falling to the ground.
Zelenskiy did not directly name Klitschko or any other official but his emphasis on local authorities made clear he believed responsibility for the failure lay, on some levels, with the capital’s officials.
Kyiv has become the target for near nightly Russian missile and drone attacks since late April, with its inhabitants often woken up around 2am and forced to decide whether to hide at home or rush to a bomb shelter. An air raid has taken place each of the last six nights, although on Friday nobody was killed or injured.
Klitschko fought back on Friday, releasing a statement in which he said: “This is about joint and fair responsibility.” The mayor complained the budget for Kyiv air-raid shelters was due to run out at the end of June, and said city district officials were appointed directly by Zelenskiy, nine out of 10 of whom were members of the president’s political party.
Klitschko, who visited the site on Thursday, said investigations would take place and police would patrol the city to ensure shelters were open. The interior ministry said police were also investigating the circumstances around Thursday night’s deaths.
A spokesperson for the head of the city’s military administration, the Zelenskiy-appointed Col Gen Serhiy Popko, told the Kyiv Post on Thursday that some people may have been able to enter the shelter before the three died outside it.
“The husband of the deceased woman said they tried to get into this shelter and it was closed. But according to the State Emergency Service officer who was on the spot, after the explosion, rescuers began to take people out of hiding [in the shelter]. That is, some people may have got there,” the spokesperson said.
Yaroslav said people were knocking on the clinic’s doors but were unable to rouse the security guard. People were afraid the bombing, a cruise and ballistic missile attack, could have gone on all night, and wanted safety, he said.
