Infobae in Kiev: the heartbreaking testimonies of those who lost everything in the bombed buildings

- Is this the kitchen?

- Well... this was the kitchen.

-Sure, sorry.

- It used to be all clean and tidy. Now there are only ruins left.

Talking to someone who has just lost their home is not easy. Yesterday's bombing left Ludmila without an apartment. We were there a few hours later, but it was not a day to talk, the well generated by the impact of the missile was still blowing smoke. It was a day of silence in the neighborhood.

Saturday started with another side. There were no bombings on Kiev. There were, yes, alarms, and anti-aircraft missiles that left Ukrainian bases. There were also shootings to the sky to lower drones. There was what is said action, there is permanently in the Russian circle that surrounds the capital. But there were no new impacts, which allowed the residents of the Podilsky neighborhood to return to the site destroyed yesterday by a missile and try to recover some of their things.

Talking to someone who lost their home a day ago is not easy either, but the very need to tell the story motivates them. “I live here with my three children. The oldest is not in the city, she went with her children to a small village where her grandmother lives. My other daughter, Natalia, did stay in Kiev, we are together, but luckily at the time of the bombing there was no one in the house,” he says.

If there had been anyone, his death would have been very likely. Ludmila's house is on the first floor of the building whose side wall disappeared with the explosion. From the room of his daughters to the place of the impact it is less than ten meters, and you can see from the room without walls the huge gap.

Some friends of the daughter work on removing the rubble. They fill the shovel, throw the stone out, and do it again. In the apartment next to Ludmila there lives an old lady with her daughter. They were there at 8:04 on March 18, when the missile fell. Ludmila does not know if they are well, they were taken to the hospital and are waiting for news.

“This was my room, I slept here,” he says, pointing to a red armchair-bed that is full of dust. You can't see the color of the floor, it's covered with dirt. Grime, I mean, the pile of things made up of what used to be books in a library, ornaments, remains of a coffee table, the glass of that coffee table, pieces of fallen wall. The state in which a bomb leaves an environment is too arbitrary, nothing can be understood where it was and how it got there. In Ludmila's kitchen the heater was compressed, as if he had been given twenty palazos. The jars of jams and preserved foods all ended up on the counter, mostly standing, without tipping over. The pool is full of things full of dust, and behind the faucet there is a strange violet stain, a kind of bloodstream that must be, rather, an exploded beet, a piece of borch scattered.

Ludmila is 56 years old and speaks very good English. She asks to send her photos of her house, which may help her in the future. “Fortunately, neither I nor anyone else was here, nor my daughters nor my grandchildren. It is fortunate that no one was there because otherwise it would have been serious,” he says.

- Why weren't they in the house? Did you imagine they could bomb here?

I had no idea this could happen. It's a residential neighborhood. I've been living here for twenty years and I don't have an apartment anymore.

- Where are you going to sleep today?

I'm sleeping at a friend's house today.

- Is it far from here?

-No, that's pretty close.

- And you're not afraid to be around if there's another bombing?

- Of course I'm afraid. Every minute I'm afraid. It's very dangerous to be in this place. But today I don't think there is any safe corner of the country.

Three floors above Ludmila's apartment is - it was - the time of Liena. He's 35 years old. His children's room overlooked the square where the rocket fell. Today there are no walls or windows, it is an open floor full of remnants of things. An armchair (or a bed, it is not distinguishable), abuts against a rest of the wall that remained standing. On the other side of the room, a bed with a large picture of two boys in it. It's pierced everywhere. Liena takes it and points to the boys: “they are my children,” she says. They are ten and twelve years old, but they were not in the house, they had left town more than a week ago.

On the other side of the square, also in view from the room, is the school where your children go. On the left, a kindergarten that is not usually seen but now, all open, is obvious. In the room there is also an empty wardrobe, a hanging calendar, many cushions, cardboard boxes of slippers, study folders, magazines.

“Bomb here, next to the school, next to the houses, to generate panic. He wants to scare us all. He's crazy and he wants to fill us with fear,” he says, talking about Putin. Suddenly, his sight crosses something out there and he's quiet. He cries a little and points. “There's our car, in that garage, but now it's completely destroyed. We don't have a car anymore...” he says. The few cars that were around the building are indeed burned: they were set on fire with the explosion and there was no chance of saving any of them. Some of them look machine-gunned, but it is the shrapnel of the missile that make them look like victims of a shooting.

“President Zelensky promised that the government would help us rebuild and recover everything we lost, but that will take time. This is crazy. It's crazy,” says Liena. You're right, but there we are, standing in that madness, under a roof that has a huge crack and that no one knows how long it can last on its feet. While he can, he brings out the valuables he finds, but even the things he takes will taste like loss.

At the foot of the building leading one of the removals is Andryi. He is 53 years old and lives in a building about 70 meters from the place where the impact occurred. He saw everything. The sirens were ringing for a long time, but there are already too many, they sound all day, and this time he didn't take it into account. He went out to his balcony and lit himself a cigarette. Then, in a second, in less, he saw a fireball passing at full speed in front of him and then the explosion sounded. Andryi was fired to the back and fell on his back in the middle of his living room. He hit his head and one eye, which is completely inflamed and purple, with a green liquid that was put in the hospital.

“I always ask that God give health to our air defence boys, who respond to these monsters attacking us trying to shoot down these missiles. They defend us as they can. But yesterday at 8 in the morning they couldn't. I was just smoking, I was airing the house so I had the window open, and it was a second. I heard the sound and (excuse the word) I fell on my ass on the floor... The glass blew up, everything. I got up quickly, started helping my mother-in-law, who is old, so I could get her out. Then the doctors came and sewed up my wound,” he says.

“In this neighborhood we all know each other, we have been the same neighbors for years, there is no military building nearby, no place of government, nothing, just neighbors and a school, a kindergarten... Why are you doing this to us? If I were in a military building I might understand, but why here? What have we done to him? ”. He too, like so many, speaks to Vladimir Putin. He can't say too much without crying or pain, and the mixture that forms between them.

“A friend lives in the destroyed building, but he wasn't there by luck. He's not in town and we're trying to get all his stuff out. How is this possible? I am a man of faith, I ask God, I always ask forgiveness for the guilty, but this is not the work of a man, this is evil, this is something else...”, he says. And he closes looking at the camera, speaking, as he says, for the world to hear: “Please, I want peace. How can you negotiate with this scoundrel? How? I just want peace!”

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