Russia steps up missile attack on recaptured Ukraine city
KHERSON, Ukraine — Natalia Kristenko’s dead body lay covered in a blanket in the doorway of her apartment building for hours overnight. City workers were at first too overwhelmed to retrieve her as they responded to a deadly barrage of attacks that shook Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson.
The 62-year-old had walked outside her home with her husband Thursday evening after drinking tea when the building was struck. Kristenko was killed instantly from a wound to the head. Her husband died hours later in the hospital from internal bleeding.
“Russians took the two most precious people from me,” their bereft daughter, Lilia Kristenko, 38, said, clutching her cat inside her coat as she watched on in horror Friday as responders finally arrived to transport her mother to the morgue.
“They lived so well, they lived differently,” she told The Associated Press. “But they died in one day.”
A salvo of missiles struck the recently liberated city of Kherson for the second day Friday in a marked escalation of attacks since Russia withdrew from the city two weeks ago following an eight-month occupation. It comes as Russia has stepped up bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid and other critical civilian infrastructure in a bid to
tighten the screw on Kyiv. Officials estimate that around 50 percent of Ukraine’s energy facilities have been damaged in the recent strikes.
The Ukrainian governor of Kherson, Yaroslav Yanushevych, said Friday that Russian shelling attacks killed 10 civilians and wounded 54 others the previous day, with two neighborhoods in the city of Kherson coming “under massive artillery fire.”
The Russian shelling of parts of the Kherson region recently recaptured by Kyiv compelled authorities to transfer hospital patients to other areas, Yanushevych
said.
Soldiers in the region had warned that Kherson would face intensified strikes as Russian troops dig in across the Dnieper River.
On Friday morning people sifted through what little remained of their destroyed houses and shops.
Outside an apartment building that was badly damaged, residents filled buckets with water that pooled on the ground. Workers at the morgue used puddles to clean their bloody hands.
Outside shelled apartment buildings residents picked up debris and frantically searched for relatives while paramedics helped the injured.
“I think it’s so bad and I think all countries need to do something about this because it’s not normal,” said Ivan Mashkarynets, a man in his early 20s who was at home with his mother when the apartment block next to him was struck.
“There’s no army, there’s no soldiers. There are just people living here and they’re (still) firing,” he said.