After the night of terror in Kiev’s search for the dead continues

Euro Puorenkov stood on the police tape line, which separated the public from the intensive search and rescue operation around his building.

He looked at his apartment, in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. His windows disappeared, the balcony was on the border of the collapse.

Below the personal belongings were scattered on the roads. Sheets and towels hung from tree branches.

Cruise missile crashed into this usual residential block in the Salamanski area on Tuesday morning, most likely traveling about 500 km / h. The explosion destroyed 35 apartments and allocated a whole part of the building.

By Wednesday, 23 people were found dead in rubble. Throughout Ukraine, at least 30 were killed in attacks, all but two of them in Kiev.

The air strike on the building of the currency was only one of the huge waves sent by Russia – more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, the Ukrainian Air Force reported.

Sharf smashed the capital within nine hours, from the north to the entire dawn. It was among the worst attacks on Kiev since the full -scale invasion of Ukraine began.

The 43-year-old warehouse of Levorenkov lowered his eyes from his broken apartment. His face was cut and grazed, and one of his eyes was a lot of blood. He couldn’t see it.

He was in bed when the rocket hit, he said. His elderly mother slept in the next room.

“It was warm, fire and smoke,” he said, remembering the huge impact a few meters from the wall. “I fainted. When I came, I heard my mom shouted.”

Neighbors helped Ruskov knock his deformed doors and get his mother’s apartment. Other survivors hit the remains of the destroyed building.

“People shouted, the children were crying,” said the pensioner Arcadiy Volenchuk, 60. “It was full of chaos.”

Outside the residents tried to find a safe route through the burning of cars and providing garbage.

“Everything was on fire,” Ala said, 69, the teacher. “Fuel sides exploded in the cars. The broken glass was poured on top, as well as pieces of concrete and tiles.”

According to him, the mother of Purenkov was aimed at intensive therapy, with two broken claws, decreased both in the eyes and to serious damage to her internal organs that required surgery.

She was one of the more than 100 wounded in the city. About north Sergi Dubrov, anesthesiologist and director of the 12th city clinical hospital in Kiev, felt that the blows were starting.

He said only his hospital would receive 27 patients.

“They had soft tissue injuries, breaks from broken glass, damage to the blood vessels. There were traumatic injuries and internal injuries in the chest. One was cut off by the femoral artery – we were able to repair it. The worst was a woman with an open head injury.

“These are the types of injuries we see from such attacks.”

Patients at the Dr. Dubrov hospital made up 18 to 95, he said. Three were in the 90s. Strikes such as residential buildings can be especially dangerous for the elderly and the powerless, which cannot easily move to the underground shelter.

64-year-old disabled Oleksandr Bongarchuk, whose apartment was also close to the point of exposure, was unable to reach the shelter. He lay in bed, frightened throughout, he said.

An hour after the attack, Bondarchuk was able to slowly wade down. “It was awful,” he said. “Everything was destroyed.”

Some of those whose apartments were badly damaged were able to find refuge with friends or relatives. Others are unlucky. “That’s all I have,” said Bongarchuk.

The strikes suffered from Ukraine as President Volodzimir Zelensky, went to the G7 conference in Canada to meet world leaders. Some in Ukraine suspect that the terms were intentional – a cruel message from Russia.

The scale of the attack emphasized Ukraine’s desperate need in international support, including increasing air protection. But in the end, it will be unsuccessful for Zelensky.

His long -awaited bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump evaporated when the strike took place when Trump announced that he would leave the conference at the beginning of the crisis in the Middle East.

As Trump is not present, the meeting of European leaders in Ukraine failed to draw joint support of the country-language, which was very convincing on the Ukrainian side.

When Zelensky traveled from Canada on Wednesday, people from the neighborhood of Salamanski on the southwest of Kiev gathered to put flowers on the site of the cruise missile.

Police would not allow Evena Puorenkov to pass the ribbon line to get his possessions and his mother from their broken apartment, so he just stood and looked. In a hundred meters, the ambulance staff has just found two more bodies in the rubble.

They didn’t know how much more they would find, they said.

Anastasia Levchenko contributed to this report. Photos by Joel Hannerator.