Ukraine war: She called her daughter three times, then the line went dead

A mother is helpless as student gets trapped in her burning flat after a direct hit.

Firemen work to extinguish a fire in a housing block hit by Russian shelling in the Sviatoshynsky district in western Kyiv. Picture: State Emergency Service of Ukraine via AFP

The latest victim of Russia’s style of war, trapped in her burning high-rise as dawn broke, was just about able to call her mother for help.

That made the misery all the worse for Svetlana Povelko, 50, knowing there was nothing she could do but wait.

“We spoke on her phone first thing, after the explosion,” Povelko said six hours later, as she watched the smouldering remnants of the apartment building where her daughter Julia lived.

“She was crying, hysterical. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

She spoke to Julia a second time and understood then that she was trapped in her flat on the sixth floor of the block, which had been struck at 4am on Monday by a random artillery shell, another target of the Russian assault on Kyiv. The walls had buckled, the doors would not open, and flames were taking hold.

She answered a third time, telling her mother that at least her piano was unharmed. Music was always so important to Julia, her mother said.

But then the fourth time she tried to call, the line was dead, and she heard her daughter no more.

Ms Povelko went to the block of flats on a sprawling housing estate and stood outside watching the firemen extinguish the remaining flames and work their way through the building’s blackened, still smoking wreckage.

She was hoping for news one way or the other.

“Some people here said they saw her afterwards,” she said, stoic but uncertain what to do with herself in the melee of fire engines, hosepipes, journalists and onlookers. “Some people said they didn’t.” Neither the police nor the hospitals had been able to help.

Julia, 20, a psychology student at the University of Ukraine, had moved to a rented flat in the block.

There was no particular military target in the area. It is on the road from the city centre to the embattled western suburbs of Irpin and Bucha, but they are still more than 8km away.

But Kyiv’s Soviet-era apartment buildings appear to be subject to a new softening up campaign. On Monday, it was a block in the district of Obolon, in the north of the city, where two people were killed. Not long after Julia’s apartment was hit, another rocket slammed into a 10-storey complex in Podil, northwest of the centre. The front of the building exploded in pieces, but only one person was injured.

Julia’s block was not so lucky. The rocket hit low, front and centre, and the flames enveloped the building bit by bit.

Volodymyr Mikaelenko, 58, tried to run for the stairs but found himself tripping over the two elderly ladies who also lived on the 14th floor. They were on the floor trying to find air as the smoke filled their apartment and the stairwell.

He heaved them by their nightgowns into his apartment and to the open window where, after two hours, a fireman on an extendible ladder came to their rescue. “I watched the ashes swirl through the sunrise,” he said.

Further down, on the fifth floor, the firemen rescued Olena Dereyanko and her husband Vadim. As she stood in the cherry picker, Ms Dereyanko managed to persuade a fireman to go back and rescue Berta, their black German shepherd. “She is family,” she said. She then paused, and asked: “Are we bandits?”

The Dereyankos are Russian speakers and watch Russian state television broadcasts which say that the invasion is an attempt to stop the activities of criminal bandits funded by the EU.

In a moment of levity, they grasped the hand of their friend Polina Olegnichuk from the third floor, to show solidarity in the face of the invasion that had destroyed their home.

Kyiv’s boxer-mayor, the giant Vitali Klitschko, who arrived with the star power and retinue of a world heavyweight champion, was determined to use the scene of devastation to land punches on Vladimir Putin.

Russia said it was only attacking military bases, he said. “So is this a military base?” he asked. “No, it’s a war against the Ukrainian population. They are trying to put pressure on the President and on all the citizens of the country.”

He called on the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Poland, who arrived in the capital to make a stand with President Volodymyr Zelensky, to take note.

“This is not done against Ukraine, it is against all values,” he said. “We are fighting not just for Ukraine, but this war touches everyone in the world, especially in the European family.”

Ms Povelko’s husband arrived and joined a fireman entering the building, the flames now extinguished. They broke down the door of the sixth floor apartment and their fears became reality.

The fireman tried to reassure them that Julia would have died from asphyxiation before the flames reached her. But what use was consolation? “Do we have reason to live without our daughter?” her mother replied.

The Times