KYIV, Ukraine – The soft green Provence-style cabinets that Yuri and Irina Penza recently installed in their central Kyiv apartment have broken flying glass: Force a Russian strike just outside Their home on Monday morning blew out all the windows and front doors, sending houseplants and coffee cups flying.
But Mr and Mrs Penza, in their 60s and preparing their morning coffee when the explosion happened, were remarkably unharmed.
“Not even a scratch,” said Ms. Penza, standing among the ruins of her house, looking as if it had been turned upside down and shaken violently. “We were very lucky. Angels are flying above us.”
The strikes on Monday morning were the first to hit central Kyiv since the early days of the war in February. The stinging sound of incoming missiles and the inevitable crash shook the capital from a dim sense of normalcy that had persisted for months as much of the fighting shifted to points in the west. east and south. Just a day earlier, residents had joined dinner parties and drank in outdoor cafes, enjoying the last vestiges of the warm summer.
Mr and Mrs Penza recently remodeled their apartment. They installed beautiful crown moldings and antique furniture, trying to evoke a bit of southern France with a mural in their kitchen depicting a quaint village lane with colored bougainvillea. Violet.
“We renovated and thought we would live well,” Ms. Penza said.
The first rockets hit central Kyiv at around 8 a.m., just a few blocks from the couple’s home; Ms. Penza initially tried to convince herself that there had been a car accident. She said she looked out the window of the school opposite her building and saw a boy there looking up at the sky. That’s when she knew it was an attack – but she decided to go to work anyway. She and her husband own a business that supplies and warrants fire extinguishers. Her clients, she said, are counting on her to keep appointments for the day.
Then another rocket, possibly two, exploded just outside. Miss Penza had just entered the bathroom when it was blocked by flying glass. Her husband was also able to get into a hallway and avoid getting hurt.
Some of their neighbors are less fortunate. With cars in the yard still on fire, they walked out of the building in a daze, some bleeding profusely from their wounds, others trying to knock them over, scaring children and pets. The force of the explosion blew the heavy steel doors in the building’s foyer off their hinges and shattered much glass from one side of the large high-rise across the courtyard.
While the number of casualties was not immediately clear, Mr. Penza said that among his neighbors “there were no bodies.”
“They are wild, inhuman animals,” Mr. Penza said of the Russians. The gas and water were still active in the apartment, and he was finally making the cup of coffee the explosion had denied him earlier.
He and his wife say they believe Monday’s attacks were in retaliation for Ukraine’s bombing of the only bridge linking Russia to Crimea over the weekend. But Mr. Penza said he still believes that going over the span is the right thing to do.
“From a strategic point of view, it is necessary,” he said.
The bridge is the main supply route for weapons and ammunition for Russian troops trying to hold onto territory captured at the start of the war in southern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are fending off an increasingly counter-offensive. successful.
Mr. Penza said his cousin lived in the occupied city of Kherson, a southern Ukrainian port city that the Ukrainian army had been trying to liberate for months. The Ukrainian military’s approach has given locals there some hope, Mr. Penza said.
He showed reporters a photo his cousin had sent him from the local fish market, where there was a sign on a pile of carp describing them as “newly liberated”.
Not all of Penzas’ belongings were destroyed in the explosion. A centuries-old mirror in the family library that Mr. Penza restored remains intact. The TV in the room was cracked and the screen went black, but the sound still worked. Amid the sounds of falling glass and the sirens outside, it plays a vibrant choir of the Ukrainian national anthem.
“Everything will be Ukraine,” Ms. Penza said. “Glory to the Army. We will win.”
