In the rubble left by Russians, an old man tells of his good luck
Vladimir Rohovich, a 70-year-old pensioner who stayed behind in Borodianka when the Russians came a month ago, was lucky.
Today, his home is one of the few intact buildings in the town 30 miles from Kyiv. “Of course, I was expecting the invasion, but not boom, boom, boom, a tank here, a tank there,” he said. An explosion early on sprayed shrapnel on his face, causing extensive bleeding.
At the beginning of the invasion, Rohovich’s wife and daughters fled to Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine that has so far escaped the worst of the conflict. Rohovich chose to stay behind, however, to guard the family home. Around February 28, when the town fell to the Russians, Rohovich went to the college where he worked as a security guard to supplement his pension. The intoxicated Russian soldiers guarding the building, inexplicably, told Rohovich that they were from Moldova.
“I went there to see if everything was OK, but a soldier, who was cooking and drunk, said don’t come here or we will shoot,” he recalled.
Rohovich spent the following weeks staying in his house, drinking from his well and eating food provided by local volunteers who drove from house to house to take care of the few remaining residents. He only ventured outside to his small gated garden as buildings around him were levelled by bombs.
One week after Russia withdrew its troops from the Kyiv region, Rohovich said he has no plans to leave the town as he waits for his family to return.
“What can I do? I’m just OK. All the stuff of my family is here, so I can’t go anywhere,” he said.
On Thursday, the fire rescue team were at work digging through rubble at a destroyed apartment block. Painstakingly pulling away bricks from the body of a man, they freed him from the debris, he was put into a body bag and placed next to six other corpses waiting to be taken away in an ambulance.
While the world’s horrified gaze has been fixed on the awful images from Bucha, the city where scores of bodies were discovered shot in the streets after Russian forces fled the area at the beginning of April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech on Friday that the death toll in Borodianka was likely to be much worse.
Ukrainian authorities accuse Russia of razing the town, which experienced a level of destruction unmatched by any other community in the Kyiv region, from the air.
Bombing reduced apartment blocks throughout the city to rubble, with piles of concrete sitting adjacent to half-destroyed high-rises. Debris littered the streets last week, with smashed cars bearing bullet holes lying in the middle of the roads. The Latin letter V, which has emerged as a prowar symbol for the Russian side, was spray painted everywhere on buildings and vehicles. One intersection bore the phrase “Stop. They shoot” in Russian on the side of a ruined van.