Ukraine’s tragic week shows there’s no safe place in war
By SAMYA KULLAB and HANNA ARHIROVA
today
People pay their respects at a makeshift memorial at the scene where a helicopter crashed into civil infrastructure on Wednesday, Jan. 18, in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 20, 2023. This past week has been an especially tragic one for Ukraine. A barrage of Russian missiles struck an apartment complex in the southeastern city of Dnipro on Jan. 14, and the death toll from that attack rose steadily in the days that followed, with at least 45 civilians killed, including six children. Then on Wednesday, a government helicopter carrying the interior minister and other officials crashed into a building housing a kindergarten in a suburb of Kyiv. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)
BROVARY, Ukraine (AP) — A small broom and dustpan in hand, Olga Prenzilevich cleans up the debris along the road in a sleepy Kyiv suburb next to a cordoned-off mound of charred vehicles and misshapen wreckage.
But she can’t sweep away the terrible memory of seeing the government helicopter that carried Ukraine’s interior minister tumbling through the fog and crashing into the kindergarten building. Or the frantic dash afterward to save the children, their tiny bodies in flames.
“I am still in shock,” the 62-year-old custodian says, the acrid stench of burning still in the air.
Nearby, Oksana Yuriy, 33, watches investigators photograph the scene to try to piece together how Wednesday’s crash happened.
“I thought this was a safe place,” she said. “Now I understand there is no such thing.”
This is the hard lesson Ukrainians have had to learn in a week of mourning at least 59 dead in places that many considered safe from the violence of the war against Russia, now in its 11th month.
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Since February, they have seen lives lost from missile strikes and battlefield combat, and civilians dying in schools, theaters, hospitals and apartment buildings. They have suffered irretrievable losses: a loved one, a place to call home, and for some, any hope for the future.
