Kyiv, Ukraine – Serhiy Parkhomenko’s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and levelled by a Russian missile early on Thursday.
The unbearably red, eardrum-rupturing explosion killed 12, wounded 87, gouged out windows and damaged roofs in dozens of nearby buildings of the tranquil, leafy neighbourhood in northwestern Kyiv.
The shockwave caused Pakhomenko’s steel entrance door to fly through his living room, flattening a cosy armchair he or his wife used to sit in during hundreds of earlier shellings.
Luckily, they were in bed during the 1am [23:00 GMT on Wednesday] strike, the largest in Kyiv since the July 2024 bombing that damaged Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and killed 34.
The Parkhomenkos hastily grabbed their documents and rushed outside. Serhiy also managed to drag his 68-year-old next-door neighbour out of the debris of his apartment.
“I have been really lucky,” Parkhomenko, 60, a telecommunications expert, told Al Jazeera, standing next to his broken furniture and a flatscreen TV that somehow remained intact.
What most confounds him has been the White House’s inaction over the death and destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine since Donald Trump’s re-election as United States president.
Trump turns a “blind eye” to what Russian President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, Parkhomenko insisted.
The neighbour he had saved was sitting on a bench wrapped in a blanket, his face cut and bruised, and kept repeating: “You won’t frighten us.”
Even though Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP!” in a social media post on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said a day earlier that Washington would refuse to mediate peace talks if Kyiv and Moscow don’t start them within days.
“We’ve shown them the finish line,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday in the Oval Office after news of the strike on Kyiv. “We need both of them to say yes, but what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end.”
Close to Parkhomenko was an American who arrived in Kyiv to teach Ukrainian servicemen English and join Dobrobat, a volunteer group that rebuilds houses all over the war-battered nation.
“I feel a moral obligation to come and help,” Tom Satterthwaite, who once led researchers on salmon spawning in Oregon’s dammed rivers, told Al Jazeera while hauling broken bricks and stucco downstairs.
He said the White House had failed to uphold its security guarantees to Kyiv, according to the Budapest Memorandum.
The 1994 deal prohibited Moscow, Washington and London from using military force against Ukraine in return for its abandonment of nuclear weapons.
Kyiv inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but agreed to transfer it to Russia in return for the security guarantees.
“Ukraine got the shaft on the deal,” Satterthwaite said.
Saved by her glasses
The destruction and debris after the shelling seemed shocking to some foreign volunteers. But to the head of the Dobrobat volunteer group that invites and hosts them, the scene was familiar.
“We got used to it,” Dmytro Ivanov told Al Jazeera as other volunteers ran up and down the stairs in Parkhomenko’s building. “We see it every day.”
Russia’s strike on Ukraine on Thursday involved 70 missiles and 145 explosives-laden drones.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that the strike had targeted “military and military-adjacent sites”.
But the destroyed house next door to Parkhomenko was about a kilometre away from the Antonov Serial Production Plant, a century-old aircraft manufacturer that once produced Mriya (Dream), the world’s largest plane. The plant was burned down by Russian troops in February 2022.
But the strike on Thursday did not hit the plant if that was indeed the target. Instead, it damaged a dozen apartment buildings in the area.
Most of the victims were in the building next to Parkhomenko’s, which was almost completely levelled.
One of the survivors was Yelena, a blonde woman in her 40s whose impeccable hairdo, makeup and glasses contrasted with everything around her.
The glasses are what saved her, seconds after the strike when she moved to grab them – and her upstairs neighbour’s gas stove fell on the spot she’d just been standing in.
The blast collapsed the inner walls and ceiling of her first-floor corner apartment, while her husband Viktor saved his upstairs neighbour’s two-year-old girl from the debris.
She and her husband crawled outside to see their car mauled by the shockwave, while natural gas pipes in the building were “bursting like ropes” and neighbours yelled for help, she told Al Jazeera.
They spent hours helping them in the darkness and panic before finding out the girl’s mother had been killed.
‘There are still people down there’
At dawn, once the shock and adrenaline had worn off, Yelena realised her hair was full of broken glass, brick fragments and asbestos dust.
She rushed to her relative’s apartment to clean up and then came back to retrieve whatever was left of her belongings.
“No apartment, no car, no stuff,” she said with a sardonic smile, standing next to a dozen black garbage bags with her belongings and a microwave-sized power bank she’d been using during blackouts caused by Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure.
Rescue workers kept excavating the debris looking for survivors, while officials registered the residents. Communal workers unfurled and cut pieces of transparent plastic film to replace broken window glass.
“There are still people down there,” Yelena said.
The strike took place on the 99th day of Trump’s second presidency whose boastful pledge to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II “within 24 hours” has proved futile.
The Kremlin has continued to produce conditions for a ceasefire – and continues the ferocious shelling of Ukrainian cities almost daily.
“They say they hit military sites, but keep striking civilian areas,” Viktor, a 59-year-old survivor whose face and scalp were cut by glass shards, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to his 90-year-old mother.
Close by, a teenage boy wept and moaned uncontrollably on a bench, having just learned that his 17-year-old friend and his friend’s parents had been found dead.
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