Ukraine’s tragic week shows there’s no safe place in war

Brovary, Ukraine, Jan. 23: 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.

Since February, they have seen lives lost from missile strikes and battlefield combat, and civilians dying in schools, theatres, 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. But this past week seemed to have a special cruelty to it.

It started on the weekend, when a barrage of Russian missiles slammed into an apartment complex that housed about 1,700 people in the southeastern city of Dnipro. The Jan. 14 barrage killed 45 civilians, including six children — the deadliest strike on civilians since spring — in an area once considered safe for many who fled front-line areas farther east.

Then came Wednesday’s helicopter crash at the kindergarten in the Kyiv suburb of Brovary that killed 14, including Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, other members of his ministry and the aircraft’s crew. One child on the ground was killed and 25 people were injured, including 11 children. Monastyrskyi, 42, had been traveling to the front line when the Super Puma helicopter went down in the fog, although no official cause has been determined.

Flowers piled up Friday at the fence outside the kindergarten. A 73-year-old woman hung a plastic bag full of aloe vera plants after reading that they might help heal burn victims. But not all the mourning was in Brovary or Dnipro.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, near the capital, Oleksy Zavadskyi was laid to rest after falling in battle in Bakhmut, where fighting has been intense for months. His fiancee, Anya Korostenstka, tossed dirt on his casket after it was lowered into the grave. Then she collapsed in tears.

“The courage of our military and the motivations of the Ukrainian people is not enough,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a news conference Thursday at the Mariinskyi  Palace in Kyiv. (AP)