CHERNIHIV, Ukraine – It was Yulia Hrebnyeva’s fastidiousness that saved her family’s life.
First, she sent her husband out to fix the lock on their door. She then took the children down to the basement, asking them to help her clean up the space where they slept every night to avoid Russian missile attacks.
And that’s when a Russian Su-34 fighter jet crashed through the roof of their two-story house.
A few blocks away, Vitaliy Serhienko was not so lucky. The pilot of the downed Russian plane took off. Mr. Serhienko and his brother-in-law, Serhiy Tkachenko, heard footsteps on their roof, and went outside to investigate. “We want to arrest him,” Mr. Tkachenko said.
The two men were approaching the source of the noise from opposite directions when Tkachenko heard gunfire. The pilot shot Mr. Serhienko in the chest; he died in his own chicken coop.
Tragedy and chance are randomly divided during the war, and on March 5, when a Russian plane fell from the sky, they produced two very different outcomes in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine. One family lived almost miraculously, while Mr. Serhienko, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, eventually died.
There’s an added element to the equation: Russian pilots don’t have a chance to drop bombs.
“If these bombs had fallen on Chernihiv, there would have been a lot more victims,” Ms. Hrebnyeva said, surveying the rubble still in her yard more than two months after the crash. “Our home stopped it.”
Serhienko’s sister, Svitlana Voyteshenko, buried him the next day. “He was a good man, he worked hard,” she said. “Everybody likes him. ”
The crash claimed another life when the fire spread to a house across the yard where Mrs Hrebnyeva and a bedridden elderly man were burned to death.
Chernihiv, just 40 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, is quickly besieged at the start of the war, surrounded by Russian troops invading from both sides. The very fierce attacks. Oleksandr A. Lomako, head of the Cherhiniv City Council, said in an interview that Russian forces deliberately bombed critical infrastructure such as water and electricity supply stations, as well as food depots. real.
Lomako said that prosecutors had recorded 350 deaths from missile attacks, and he estimated that another 700 had died from siege-related causes: lack of electricity, water and Food.
Anger towards the destruction and death that Russia has caused was seething among residents as the pilot ejected from the plane. Members of Chernihiv’s Territorial Defense Force, a volunteer military unit, heard the explosion, a soldier named Ivan Lut said. He ran to where he thought the pilot could land, saw the orange and white parachute hanging from the house and started his own chase, he said.
The chase ended next door to Mr. Tkachenko’s house when the Russian pilot, named in an intelligence investigation as Major General Aleksandr V. Krasnoyartsev, was arrested.
His face and chest were covered in blood. Lying on his back on the ground, he raised his arms, begging, “Don’t shoot, I surrender!” according to a video shot on a mobile phone of a Ukrainian soldier.
Soon, a mob gathered, some seeking revenge. “We had to fight with our own people to save his life, noting that soldiers were ordered to capture the pilot alive,” Mr. Lut said. The co-pilot was dead when the soldiers found him.
The remains of the plane, a supersonic medium-range bomber, were scattered across the yard of Miss Hrebnyeva’s home. She points out what remains of a sauna and a small swimming pool nearby. Tulips emerge from the metal debris of the plane.
Ms. Hrebnyeva was walking to the stump of a burned tree when she saw something among the rubble: a tiny pair of jeans belonging to her six-year-old son, still folded neatly, even though the drawer used to hold them. unrecognizable. . Also: a pair of red shorts with the waistband intact but the back burned off; a tiny swimsuit; Sportswear of 10-year-old girl Denys.
“I almost wanted to take it home and wash and iron it,” she said. She came home Saturday morning after a shift was organizing supplies for the soldiers defending the city. She bought a lock at the hardware store across the street. Her husband, Rostyslav, was in the kitchen boiling dumplings for their three children and another child who was separated from her parents after Chernihiv was attacked on the first day of the war.
Ms Hrebnyeva said Hrebnyeva’s husband was abusive when she let him out to install a new lock. She led the children down to the basement to clean.
And then they heard a crash. “The bricks just fell,” she said. “Things started to shake.” She thought she heard gunshots, she added, but it was shingles on the roof that was nearing completion.
Her husband, a retired military pilot, suffered burns to his hand and but was able to get help to pull her and four children out of the basement.
“If my husband hadn’t opened the door, we would have been burned alive,” Ms. Hrebnyeva said.
From a military point of view, the destruction of the plane was a sign of Ukraine’s success in preventing Russia from gaining air superiority. Before the full-blown invasion began, many believed that Russia could subdue the Ukrainian Air Force in a matter of days and establish control of the skies. But Ukraine was able to shoot down at least 25 Russian warplanes, According to military analysis site Oryx. More than a third of them were destroyed in a few days in early March, many with handguns surface-to-air missile.
Russian pilots fly low to avoid Ukrainian missile systems, Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London.
The plane that crashed on March 5 was among about eight or nine others shot down over a period of several days. That loss ratio convinced Russian commanders that flying low during the day would be unsustainable, forcing pilots to fly at night, when darkness made it difficult for Ukraine to use surface-to-air missiles effectively. Mr. Bronk said.
On this flight, the Ukrainian military was able to shoot down the fighter jet before it dropped all its weapons: Picture afterward same kind of the plane that took off the next day, released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, showed that it was carrying at least eight 500 kg unguided bombs.
Mr. Lut said the pilot told them he only received targets for missile strikes while he was in the air, and that he was unaware they were hitting civilian targets.
Ms Voyteshenko, whose brother was killed in the chicken coop, said the pilot looked her in the eye and told her he didn’t recognize the civilians living there.
Does she believe you? “Of course not,” she said.
Standing next to the place where her brother was killed, Voyteshenko looked at the apple tree planted by her parents. She and her brother have been picking berries together since they were children.
Her brother began installing insulation and redoing the facade of their house last fall.
“Now I don’t know if we can finish it,” she said.
Miss Hrebnyeva was surprised by the events in her family’s life. “On March 5, I gave out clothes and food to everyone,” she added. “On March 6, we had nothing. People started bringing it to us.”
She said she was determined to rebuild her home. Her husband is currently with the children in Norway.
“I want to stay. I really want to stay here and rebuild my house on this very spot, just to defy the Ruscists,” she said, using a neologism for ‘Russian fascists’‘has been popular in Ukraine since the invasion.
“I want to show people that war is war, but life goes on,” she added. “We Ukrainians are strong and unbreakable – undefeatable.”
