The town of Borodianka, unrecognizable, is gutted. The buildings, destroyed, spilled their contents, mainly clothes, on the treetops.
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The long road through the modest town, located 50 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, is lined with devastation.
A building with a gaping hole recalls the explosions that have passed by, as well as this charred mattress, which hangs in the open air. A charred tank is parked in the bowels of a devastated building. Children’s toys are strewn all over the street, too numerous to count.
AFP
Nothing is out of place. Some houses simply no longer exist. Last week’s Russian retreat left traces of the battle to hold onto Borodianka.
Mykola Kazmyrenko wanders down the muddy road, pushing a cart full of aid packages. “I can’t even look, it makes me want to cry,” said the 57-year-old. “People have been stripped of their homes.”
AFP
AFP saw no bodies during this short trip to Borodianka, but locals say several of their neighbors were killed here.
“I know that five civilians were killed,” said Rafik Azimov, 58. “But we don’t know how many others are abandoned in the basements of buildings after the bombings.” “No one has tried to get them out yet, so we don’t know,” he adds.
In the town of Boutcha, AFP saw on Saturday about twenty corpses lying on the ground of a single street.
Although the human toll is not yet defined in Borodianka, the destruction is there, as far as the eye can see.
Windows are shattered, and the remnants of a life once lived behind closed doors are now scattered across the street: a fridge covered in magnets, a brown oriental rug hanging on a wall, a strangely intact.
From the top of a nine-story building, entire rooms have disappeared, their contents strewn across the floor. Only the wallpaper has survived: brown on the fourth floor, blue on the fifth, gold on the sixth.
Today, these houses are nothing more than a pile of bricks and metal, which clash to the rhythm of the harsh Ukrainian wind.
Shards of glass clink and stray cats meow among the debris.
The lawn of the roundabout leading to the city has been churned by tank tracks.
AFP
Two people climbed to the roof of a building to try to pick up the telephone network, which now does not exist in the city.
Some residents take the risk of venturing into houses to collect as many items as possible, while demining teams are still expected to secure the area.
In the central square, the imposing bust of the poet Taras Shevchenko – icon of Ukrainian culture – remains, despite two bullet holes in the face.
AFP
These verses, inscribed below the monument, implore: “Love your Ukraine / Love her… in the most difficult times / In the very last difficult minute”.
Valentyna Petrenko made her way from the nearby village to witness the horror.
“When the (soldiers, editor’s note) Russians arrived, they took our cell phones and robbed houses. We tried to behave normally with them, so as not to provoke them, ”says this 67-year-old woman, on the demolished bridge on the outskirts of the city.
“A missile hit our village, my house was in ruins, everything was in ruins,” she says. “The Russians have committed atrocities, many atrocities”.
Volodymyr Nahornyi joins Ms. Petrenko on her bicycle, but has to leave her at the level of the bridge, which is no longer passable at all.
AFP
He contemplates the city, reduced to nothing. “All the apartments were robbed and vandalized,” he laments. “Everything is ruined, everything is damaged”.
“I buried six people,” he says. “The others are under the rubble.”
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca