KHARKIV, UKRAINE, Apr 4 — “We woke up around 00:30 after hearing the first explosion from afar. Around 1:07 a.m., our family understood that ‘Shaheds’ were flying towards us. As soon as we started to exit our room, boom!”
Oleksandra, 22, tells us this when we arrive at the hit site. She lives in one of the buildings that came under fire in a Russian drone strike on Kharkiv this night. The strike hit her neighbor’s flat. She adds, “A few centimeters closer, and my parents would probably be dead.”
After the attack, Oleksandra’s stepfather and other residents began putting out the fire that spread afterward.
Emergency workers arrived and warned them about the possibility of a second drone strike. It happened an hour and a half after Oleksandra and her family hid between garages — “the Shahed hit the same spot.”
Yurii from the same building says the second drone hit when rescuers were providing aid to the victims. The attack killed three of them.
“I’m so sorry for their families’ loss,” Oleksandra says. “They are the real heroes who came to save us.”
Oleh Syniehubov, governor of the Kharkiv Oblast, said that overnight Russia launched around 18 Shahed drones on the region, injuring at least twelve people, including a police officer who came to document war crimes and an energy worker. Apart from the three first responders, a 69-year-old woman was killed in drone attacks.
Syniehubov said, “It’s a massive strike to cause terror. [They targeted] energy system and civilian buildings.”
Currently, city workers and other relevant services are working at hit sites, cleaning the debris and helping to evaluate the degree of damage to residential apartments and infrastructure.
Victoria Mankoska, Ivan Samoilov, Dasha Lobanok, and Yana Sliemzina worked on this story.
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Read more: “Occupiers were driving by and shooting at houses.” How one Ukrainian village survived occupation
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