UKRAINE — “I pulled myself from under the piece of ceiling,” says Vira, who lives in the village of Velyki Prokhody in the Kharkiv region.
On April 11, at around 4:00 p.m., Russians dropped an aerial bomb there, injuring four people. The village is located about 18 miles northeast of Kharkiv and less than 7 miles from the border with Russia. Gwara Media’s team went there the next day.
Vira laid down for a quick rest after cleaning up. A moment later, the impact from the bomb blew off her roof, and she got trapped under the ceiling. She was able to get herself out from under the debris because of the ceiling’s construction. The pieces of it still lie around in different rooms of her house.
She leads our team through the corridors, and the glass from the shuttered windows cracks under our steps.
When we speak to her, Vira waits for her son to come from Kharkiv and help her move out. She’s in the minority here. Not many people, out of 140 who are currently living in the village, are willing to leave.
Starosta of the Velyki Prokhody community, Svitlana Kucherenko, tells us that only people who are left with nothing after Russian attacks — “with houses damaged or burned down” — agree to go.
“But I urge people to go where it’s safe while they still have the chance,” Kurchenko says. “A time might come when no one would be allowed to come [to the village], and it’ll be difficult to evacuate.”
Russians intensified attacks on the Kharkiv region and Kharkiv at the end of December and then again in mid-March, exploiting a lack of air defense systems and missiles and shortages of military aid from Ukrainian allies. On April 11, authorities ordered a mandatory evacuation for families with children from 47 towns and villages in four frontline communities of Kharkiv region because of frequent Russian shelling.
Ivan Samoilov, Daria Lobanok, and Yana Sliemzina worked on this story. Thank you for caring about Ukraine in this frankly horrific times. It’d mean the world if you’d consider supporting our team on Patreon, BMC, or PayPal — that’ll help us fund our field reports from the Kharkiv region, buy new equipment for blackouts caused by Russian attacks on Kharkiv infrastructure, and add to our newsroom’s emergency fund.
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