‘I said to my mum, “the main thing is you are alive” – 15 minutes later she was dead’
Families who have lost loved ones in the Russian bombardment of Borodyanka, northern Ukraine, tell of their despair
The last time Vadym Zahrebelnyi saw his mother and brother, he was begging them to move from the shelter where they had been hiding from Russian bombs.
They refused to move from the shelter under an apartment block on their street, fearing they would be killed if they travelled out in the open.
But shortly after Mr Zahrebelnyi left, taking his wife and child with him to a more secure location, he saw a Russian plane circling his family’s building. A bomb dropped and the block was obliterated instantly.
Now, Mr Zahrebelnyi, 44, has spent three days next to the rubble as rescue workers try to reach the bodies of his relatives in Borodyanka, north-west of Kyiv. The town was subjected to Russian bombardment and occupied before being retaken last week.
“I tried to convince them,” he told The Sunday Telegraph standing with his sister, Yuliia Prudius, outside the colossal mound of rubble that had become the graves of his mother, Lidiia, and brother, Volodymyr.
Ms Prudius, who had been sheltering elsewhere, had spoken to her mother shortly before she was killed in the blast.
She explained how Lidiia had come above ground after her brother had left in order to make a phone call, and had been distressed at the sight of her flat in a neighbouring building, which had been destroyed.
“My mother was very upset that her apartment had burned down, she told me that the apartment was gone. I said to her, ‘Mum, don’t worry, it’s not important. The main thing is that you are alive.’”
Fifteen minutes after that call she was dead.
Lidiia and Volodymyr had been sheltering with Volodymyr’s wife and parents-in-law. Now, every time Mr Zahrebelnyi thinks back to the day last month when they lost five family members, he wishes he could have persuaded them to leave with him.
“The last thing they said to me was, ‘You go,’” he said. “It hurts.”
Neither Mr Zahrebelnyi nor his sister hold hope of finding any of the group alive.
“Right now the most important thing is to find the bodies,” he said.
Emergency service workers cannot predict how long the recovery operation will take. They suspect there could be 50 people, if not more, buried beneath the rubble, which is a labyrinthine mountain of bricks and slabs of concrete.
For more than a month Russian troops terrorised Borodyanka from both the ground and skies, relentlessly bombing it day after day.
The scenes of devastation throughout the village speak to this campaign of violence, with buildings destroyed, and streets strewn with shattered glass, burnt-out cars and telephone pylons that have been wrenched from the ground.
Almost every home has been damaged in some way, be it bullets on the walls or blown out windows.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy warned that the aftermath in Borodyanka would be worse than in Bucha, where dead bodies were left discarded in the street after the Russians retreated.
The death count in Borodyanka for now remains unknown, but the recovery operation witnessed at Mr Zahrebelnyi’s apartment block was just one of a number taking place throughout the town.
He said throughout this whole invasion it has been like living through a nightmare. “We know that civilians have died, they have been tortured, there is no good here.”
He explained that when they were in the shelter before it was bombed, his sister-in-law had become so petrified as a result of the shelling that she had began starving herself, physically unable to eat because of how terrifying the situation was.
“Every day the shelling was getting worse and it was scary to be underground,” he said. However, being above ground was no better because the Russian soldiers who had occupied the town were so terrifying.
“It was a terrible time,” he said.
After leaving the shelter, Mr Zahrebelnyi moved his wife and child to a friend’s home in a neighbouring village. Later they moved again, concerned that their new location was coming under too much fire.
The friend’s home was struck by a bomb after they evacuated. Mr Zahrebelnyi admits that he is lucky to be alive.
Now, he is living with his sister and her husband. None of the survivors in the family can think of plans for the future. Their only hope for now is that the work of the emergency services to find their loved ones’ bodies can continue undisturbed.