Russia hits liberated city with ‘massive artillery fire’
KHERSON, UKRAINE — Natalia Kristenko’s dead body lay covered in a blanket in the doorway of her apartment building for hours. 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.
The governor of Kherson, Yaroslav Yanushevych, said Friday that Russian shelling attacks killed 10 civilians and wounded 54 the previous day, with two neighborhoods in Kherson coming “under massive artillery fire.”