118 Victory Embankment
118 Victory Embankment is just another address within a huge nondescript housing development – a long, unlovely block of flats built during the Soviet era that is home to more than a thousand families in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Nearly a year into the war its residents were doing what still passed for normal on a Saturday afternoon – some scrolling through social media, others napping, one couple cooking a late lunch and looking after a one-year-old infant.
Although the war had changed their lives – there were frequent power cuts now, the local economy was stagnant, and some of the young men were away fighting in the east – the city was far enough from the frontline that it was still considered fairly safe.
Then, at 3.40pm on Jan 14th, a Russian missile the length of a double-decker bus, fired from a ship hundreds of miles away, slammed into the building.
It’s 2,000-pound warhead detonated on impact, obliterating more than 30 apartments. At least 46 people were killed and dozens more injured.
When I visited the building, a week later, rescuers had just given up looking for bodies. At least 11 had been pulverised by the blast or incinerated in the intense heat of the explosion and would never be recovered.
The area around the building had been taped off and an excavator was removing slabs of concrete from the rubble and placing them into a truck.
On each side of the destroyed section of building there were jagged edges where apartments had been sliced through, as if by a sharp surgical instrument, laying bare intimate scenes of ordinary lives.
In one apartment there was a fridge with its doors blown open, still showing its contents. In another several nylon shopping bags were arranged on a hook, ready for use.
In a third a tiled blue kitchen wall could be seen with a kitsch representation of blooming red flowers. Until recently this had been the inner sanctum of a family’s life. Now it was open to the world.
I recently spent three weeks in Ukraine, my first visit since the eve of war. I travelled to eastern and southern frontline towns, some of them being battered daily by Russian artillery; to Kyiv, the capital, where I spent four or five days in an oasis of relative normality; and to the snowy mountains in the west hard on the Romanian border.
And one thing that struck me repeatedly was the strange topography of war: the way that death, destruction and human injury, nestle right up against the normality of everyday life.
Sometimes this juxtaposition is very physical. Here in Dnipro the apartment building I was looking at almost seemed like a metaphor cast in concrete: one half of an apartment left whole, plates still on the shelves, fruit still in the bowl, paintings still on the walls. The other half had collapsed irrevocably into the mounds of rubble below.
Sometimes it is in the human physique: in clinics where injured soldiers were taken to recover in and around Kyiv I saw young men in peak physical condition but with an arm or a leg unexpectedly missing, a scar that disfigured one side of their face, or an eye that no longer functioned.
And other times it is in the mind. In the frontline town of Orikhiv, an hour east of Zaporizhzhia, Lyuba, a 59-year-old community worker spends every night alone in a dark cellar and each morning and evening makes a perilous walk to and from work – seven minutes each way – even when the shells are falling. But once a month she takes the shrapnel-splattered road to the city to get her nails varnished.
And, then, occasionally there is a glimpse into a more moral landscape. While I set off for a walk through the shabby centre of Dnipro the friend and colleague I was travelling with, Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon, tracked down Artem Starosiek who had had set up an open-source intelligence firm.
Artem, and his company Molfar, had been researching a Russian attack on a shopping centre in a place called Kremenchuk last June that killed 21 people even before the Dnipro apartment block was hit. Using Russian websites and social media Molfar had tracked down the unit responsible and even the names of the officers involved and were preparing to publish them.
When the new attack came they immediately realised it bore many of the hallmarks of the first. In both cases a KH-22 missile was used – an anti-ship missile which has a targeting system that performs well over the water but poorly over land.
In both cases the target was probably nearby civilian infrastructure in keeping with Vladimir Putin’s efforts to degrade Ukraine’s power and water supplies. And in both cases Tupulev M3 bombers appeared to have been used.
Molfar eventually found Russian press accounts that led them to the 52nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. There were even photographs of the Russian team, led by a Col Oleg Tymoshin, getting medals after their attack on Kremenchuk.
Molfar found 44 names of commanders, pilots, and even maintenance and fuelling personnel involved in the attack. After the Dnipro attack they published them on their website.
“They are all guilty,” Artem said. “They all helped in the process.” But he reserved special blame for Col Tymoshin. “He gave the order, 100 percent,” he said.
Even in Russia, where dissent has been strictly repressed, there was outrage at the Dnipro bombing. Flowers were laid at statues of prominent Ukrainians, but they were soon cleared away by police, and some of those laying the flowers were arrested.
At the scene of the attack in Dnipro an emergency centre was soon set up and locals brought clothes, blankets, food and children’s shoes for those who were now without a home.
I watched as relatives and well-wishers quietly visited a small shrine of flowers and soft toys nearby. At least six children had died when the missile hit the building. The initial outpouring of grief had passed, however, and in its place was a steely anger and determination.
I spoke to Tatyana, 22, who was visiting the scene with her husband, Dmitry, 29, and their 13-month-year old baby Stefaniya. “The people who did this are criminals,” she said. “They are just laughing at us.”
Elanora, 45, who lives 100 metres from the site of the blast, said: “When we go to sleep we just never know if we will wake up again. We hope this will all soon end. But it must end in victory. There is no other way we can be free.”
Please add comments, offer corrections and share this with your friends. Thank you to all paid subscribers - your support makes these posts possible.
NEWS & UPCOMING
+ I am now back teaching in Budapest. One of the courses I am teaching is about the war in Ukraine.
+ Our 2023 project to help wounded Ukrainian soldiers by bringing them to Canada for skills training, recuperation and inspiration is now live. You can see more here.
+ In early May I will be returning to Canada and the bears. This year we will be running both a spring and autumn bear-viewing season. If you think you might be interested in visiting please check out our newly-updated website at Wild Bear Lodge.