KYIV, Ukraine — The soft green Provence-style cabinets Yuri and Irina Penza had recently installed in their central Kyiv apartment were strafed from flying glass: The force of a Russian strike just outside their home on Monday morning had blown out all the windows and the front door, sending houseplants and coffee mugs flying.
But Mr. and Ms. Penza, who are in their 60s and were preparing their morning coffee when the blast hit, were remarkably unscathed.
“Not even a scratch,” said Ms. Penza, standing amid the wreckage of her home, which looked as if it had been turned upside down and shaken vigorously. “We were just very lucky. The angels are flying above us.”
The barrage of strikes on Monday morning was the first to hit central Kyiv since the early days of the war in February. The searing sound of incoming rockets and the inevitable thud of impact viciously shook the capital from a dim sense of normalcy that had prevailed for months as the bulk of the fighting shifted to points in the east and south. Just a day earlier, residents had been attending dinner parties and drinking in outdoor cafes, enjoying the last vestiges of summer warmth.
Mr. and Ms. Penza had recently renovated their apartment. They installed beautiful crown moldings and antique furniture, trying to conjure a bit of southern France with a mural in their kitchen depicting a quaint village alleyway with purple bougainvillea.
“We renovated and thought we were going to be living well,” Ms. Penza said.
The first missiles hit central Kyiv at around 8 a.m., just a few blocks from the couple’s home; Ms. Penza initially tried to convince herself that there had been a car accident. She said she looked out the window at the school across from her building and saw a young boy there looking up at the sky. That’s when she knew it was an attack — but she decided to go to work anyway. She and her husband own a business supplying and servicing fire extinguishers. Her clients, she said, were counting on her to keep the day’s appointments.
Then another missile, maybe two, exploded right outside. Ms. Penza had just stepped into the bathroom and was shielded from flying glass. Her husband was able to duck into a corridor and avoid injury as well.
Some of their neighbors were less fortunate. With cars in the courtyard still ablaze, they stumbled in a daze out of the building, some with blood streaming from wounds, others trying to corral terrified children and pets. The force of the blast blew the heavy steel doors to the building’s lobby off their hinges and stripped much of the glass from one side of the large high-rise across the courtyard.
While the number of casualties was not immediately clear, Mr. Penza said that among his neighbors “there were no bodies.”
“They’re inhuman, wild animals,” Mr. Penza said of the Russians. The gas and water still worked in the apartment, and he was finally making the cup of coffee the blast had denied him earlier.
He and his wife said that they believed Monday’s attacks were revenge for Ukraine’s bombing of the sole bridge linking Russia to Crimea over the weekend. But Mr. Penza said he still believed striking the span was the right thing to do.
“From a strategic point of view it was necessary,” he said.
The bridge is the main supply line for arms and ammunition being sent to Russian troops trying to hang on to territory seized at the start of the war in southern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are fighting an increasingly successful counteroffensive.
Mr. Penza said his cousin lives in the occupied city of Kherson, a southern Ukrainian port city that Ukrainian troops have been trying to liberate for months. The approach of Ukrainian troops has given locals there some hope, Mr. Penza said.
He showed a reporter a photo that his cousin had sent from the local fish market, where a sign on a pile of carp described them as “newly liberated.”
Not all of the Penzas’ belongings were destroyed in the blast. A century-old mirror in the family’s library that Mr. Penza had restored was still intact. The television in the room was cracked and its screen dark, but the sound still worked. Amid the sounds of falling glass and sirens outside, it played a rousing choral arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem.
“Everything will be Ukraine,” Ms. Penza said. “Glory to the Army. We will win.”
Source : Nytimes
