My worst journalistic nightmare is not to arrive at the scene of the attack late, but to arrive too early. When the wounded and dead have not yet been evacuated. Today it happened again.
A destroyed apartment building, a child's pink slipper covered in blood among broken glass, a crumpled piece of a Russian missile that killed civilians here.
“Come on, you need to see this,” Elena, a 43-year-old pastry chef and mother of two, tells me.
The woman leads me into the shelter past the body of the deceased, covered with a thermal blanket. I think she wants to show me the conditions in which her daughters and her dogs were hiding. But already on the stairs I understand what tragedy people experienced here at night.
“About half past three there was an explosion. And wounded people, children covered in blood, began to run into the shelter. The ambulance took an hour. And the people here, in the shelter, began to provide first aid themselves. There was a woman, a mother of two children, her leg was blown off, and her three-year-old son’s arm was wounded; someone was bandaging him. And I calmed her second son, he was only four years old. I examined him, there were only bruises on him. There was also a very seriously wounded guy,” – Elena looks around.
The entire floor of the shelter is covered with bandages, blood and someone's discarded clothes. I can't breathe. We want to go out into the fresh air with her. But the State Emergency Service employee shouts to us: “Take cover!”
Rockets are flying across Kyiv once again. I can't seem to wake up from this nightmare.
Source: Yulia Surkova / Facebook
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