Inches from death as Kremlin strikes at flats
Russia attacks civilian tower block with missile from Soviet-era designed to sink aircraft carriers
WITH her life in ruins, the young woman edged away from her bathtub, resting precariously on what was left of her floor, and into the hands of her Ukrainian rescuers.
Anastasia Shvets, 23, had been crouching alone in the shell of her seventh-floor apartment. It had been blown up by a Russian Cold War-era missile designed to sink an aircraft carrier.
She escaped, clutching a green teddy bear and string of festive gold decorations, probably left hanging after Orthodox Christmas the previous weekend.
Moments before the missile strike in central Ukraine Ms Shvets had been enjoying a Saturday lunch with her parents. Now they were buried under piles of twisted metal and concrete.
“I don’t know where my parents are,” she said. “I remember my father’s stupid jokes today, how we took pictures of puppies with my mother today. We were eating Mum’s noodles.”
A photographer captured her shock shortly after the strike when Ms Shvets realised she was alone. She crouched, on the edge of her destroyed apartment, holding her hand to her mouth, seemingly suppressing a scream.
She was then seen inching towards her rescuers, who had raised a ladder in the gaping hole where half of the block of flats had stood just hours earlier.
From a hospital bed, she showed her remarkably light injuries. She had a cut above her left eye and also across her tattooed legs. “I have no words, I have no emotions, I feel nothing but a great emptiness inside,” she said.
This was the aftermath of the missile strike on Dnipro, a city of 1.4 million on the banks of the river of the same name. It is famous for its metals industry and Soviet architecture but now Dnipro will forever conjure up the horrors of this latest Russian air strike.
Ukrainian officials have labelled it a “terrorist” attack and have been steadily raising the death toll. It stood at 30 dead and 73 injured yesterday afternoon but seemed certain to rise as rescuers used dogs to search for survivors in the wrecked building.
Dnipro’s mayor said the chances of finding anyone still alive was “minimal”.
Responding to the attack, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, condemned the Russian people’s “cowardly silence” following the missile strike.
“Your attempt to ‘wait out’ what is happening will only end with the fact that one day these same terrorists will come for you,” he said.
Even for a nation hardened by nearly 11 months of war this attack has shocked Ukraine. “These people were having a regular weekend in their homes,” said one observer.
“They wanted to feel safe. But you are never safe with a terrorist neighbour.”
This is not the first tragedy that Ms Shvets has suffered since Russia invaded Ukraine. In September she posted photos on her Instagram profile of her boyfriend in military uniform. He had been killed a fortnight earlier.
“I still can’t get over that it’s been two weeks since I heard your voice and saw your smile,” she wrote. “You told me you loved me but then everything ended, all our dreams and goals.”
In the attack on Saturday, the biggest so far this year, Russian missiles hit several targets across Ukraine in at least two waves. Most were infrastructure sites and the only reported deaths were in the Dnipro apartment block.
Russia claimed that air defence systems had hit their missile over Dnipro, deflecting it into the flats, but Ukrainian officials said they do not have defence systems capable of shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.
The attack was the first since Gen Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, took personal command of Russian forces in Ukraine. It also marked a return to using ballistic and cruise missiles to hit Ukrainian cities, rather than drones.
Vladimir Putin ignored the missile strike and insisted that his invasion was going to plan. “I hope that our fighters will please us even more with the results of their combat,” he said.
The Russian president has justified his invasion as saving Ukrainians from Nato but every missile strike and every death appears to harden Ukrainian resolve to resist.