Ukrainian firefighters search for bodies in the rubble of a collapsed building in the city of Borodionkas
Borodyanka:
In the small town of Borodka, not far from Kyiv, diggers sift through the rubble of homes destroyed by Russian bombings in search of the missing.
Her eyes read from tears and lack of sleep, Antonina looking through the remains of the building where her son lived on the third floor.
The slow process is unbearable for the 65-year-old mother, whose own home was spared from the fighting.
There is a large hole in the middle of the five-story building where it was hit by a bomb dropped from a Russian plane on the evening of March 1, a few days after the attack began.
Within seconds the ten apartments that used to stand here turned into a pile of concrete and bent metal.
“There were people in this building, it was night,” says Antonia, wearing a brown coat and a blue woolen hat.
Antonina is sitting alone on a chair in the corner of the garden of the building. She holds a cane in both hands in front of her and holds her head up, a sad, thoughtful look on her face as she watches the diggers do their job.
“People living in the two blocks on the side of the building were injured but they are still alive,” she says. “Those who stayed (in the middle section) are all dead.”
‘Maybe he’s still there’
Antonina has not heard from her 43-year-old son, Yuri, since the night the bomb was dropped.
“Maybe he managed to get out, maybe he’s hurt, maybe he’s still (under the rubble). I can’t say, I don’t know,” she says before weeping bitterly.
Scattered among the ruins of the building are a pair of shoes, a book, a water pistol, some cushions, clothes and three stuffed animals, a bear, a giraffe and a hippopotamus, all next to each other.
A mattress is caught in the branches of a tree.
Lyubov Yaremenko’s apartment used to have a small terrace, on the ground floor of one of the still standing blocks.
With rain forecast, she lays a plastic tarp over the brown sofa where she placed the patio.
It is the only piece of furniture she was able to save from her home, where everything else was destroyed by the explosion.
Doors came off their hinges, windows were broken, cupboards were broken and clothes were thrown around.
‘More frightening’
When the bombings happened, Lyubov, an older woman of about 70 years old, was not in her apartment but in the basement.
“We stayed underground for so long, about a month and a half, first here, then we ran to the basement on the other side of the street because they were bombing… I fell and hurt my ribs,” Lyubov still wondered .
“It was like there was a family in this basement with young children, that they can’t reach yet,” she says.
The main road in Borodyanka is now nothing more than a nearly two kilometer long strip of ruins and ruins.
The city, which before the war had about 13,000 inhabitants, was retaken by Ukrainian forces following the withdrawal of Russian troops from the area around Kyiv in late March.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Saturday that a worse situation was unfolding.
“They have started sorting out the ruins in Borodienka,” he said, northwest of Kyiv. “It’s a lot more frightening there. The Russian occupiers have even more victims.”
He has said the situation in Borodyanka is “much more appalling” than in Bucha, where dead civilians were discovered, some of them with their hands tied behind their backs.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova said on Thursday that 26 bodies had been recovered from two destroyed apartment buildings in Borodyanka.
Across the main square, another eight-storey high-rise building also blew up a third of its mass. A crane works to remove heavy pieces of walls blackened by the explosion.
Two rescuers in a cherry picker stand one by one looking for bodies through apartment windows.
“We would have liked it to be a simple rescue operation, but there were attacks in late February, early March,” says Svetlana Vodolaha, an emergency service worker from Kyiv.
“We don’t have an exact figure for the number of people who may still be trapped under the collapsed buildings, but we have to look for them all,” she says.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)