Mother and child’s desperate search for cover in Kiev ends outside closed shelter

Listening to the howl of air raid sirens, a mother and her 9-year-old daughter raced through the early morning darkness of the Ukrainian capital Thursday to a clinic, where a bomb shelter promised to escape another Russian missile fire.

But the clinic was on lockdown, authorities said. After explosions roared, the woman and her daughter were found dead among green trees and broken glass, just outside the door. So is another woman.

“People were knocking, knocking for a long time,” the husband of the third victim, who gave his name as Yaroslav, told the Ukrainian public. broadcaster. “There were women and children and no one opened it.”

Authorities, who announced an investigation into the inaccessibility of the shelter in the capital Kiev, did not name the dead. They described the girl, her mother, 34, and the other woman, 33, as the latest victims of Russia’s punitive and brutal campaign against civilians.

The increased pace of Russian missile salvos – there were 17 airstrikes in May – came as Ukraine prepared a long-awaited counter-offensive to retake occupied land. At the same time, Russians in border regions, especially Belgorod, have described the chaotic evacuations of children, the elderly and other residents along with heavy shelling across Ukraine.

The day’s attacks coincided with International Children’s Day, a reminder of the catastrophic toll the Russian invasion has taken on children and families.

Hours before the sirens blared in Kiev on Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had compared the experience of Ukrainian children to that of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who documented her family’s life in hiding during World War II. At one conference Focusing on children on Wednesday, he read from the diary of Yehor, an 8-year-old boy from Mariupol, the city under siege, devastated And captured by Russia last year.

“War. I slept well, woke up and smiled,” he read. “My sister has a head wound. My mother has flesh torn from her arm and a wound on her leg.

He continued: “My grandmother, Galya, two dogs and my favorite city of Mariupol died.”

At least 535 children have been killed and 1,000 others injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded last year, the United Nations said. said on Thursday, although many believe the toll is higher. Most of those casualties, according to the United Nations, were caused by explosive weapons such as artillery, rockets and airstrikes.

“If air raid sirens sound every night and sleeping alone is happiness, it’s valuable,” Mr Zelensky said in his remarks. “When there are missile attacks every night and waking up in the morning is really priceless.”

The Russian missiles, which fly about five times as fast as sound, left residents little time to take shelter on Thursday. Ukraine’s air defenses fired at the missiles six minutes after the alarm went off, hitting them all, Kyiv’s military government said.

But an interceptor near the clinic hit one of 10 Russian missiles, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, and the child and her mother were killed by the fiery debris. The girl’s grandmother arrived at daybreak to identify the bodies.

For evening after evening over the past month, Kiev’s 3.6 million residents jumped out of bed with a jolt and took cover under the fire of Russian missiles, many of which exploded in mid-air, sending down life-threatening wreckage.

Mr Klitschko said on Telegram that another 16 people were injured by debris from air defense systems shooting down incoming missiles.

Police have opened two criminal investigations into the clinic’s shelter, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Mariana Reva announced Thursday.

The mayor said investigators would focus on whether the shelter had been properly maintained and why it may have been inaccessible. Police officers now patrol bomb shelters during air raids to make sure they are open, he added.

The first deputy of Kiev’s Desnyansky district, the director and deputy director of the clinic, and a security guard were detained, Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office said late Thursday.

“Never again should a situation like this night in Kiev, when people came to the shelter and the shelter is closed, happen again,” Zelensky said Thursday evening.

Although Kiev has been under attack since the early days of the war, the intensity of Russian attacks over the past month has been shocking, even for civilians accustomed to spending hours in air raid shelters and sleepless nights in corridors.

Thursday’s strikes suggested the campaign would continue into June.

Russia’s renewed pressure on Kiev, military analysts say, may be in part an attempt to keep air defenses far from the battlefield as Ukraine prepares an offensive. In Russia’s border regions such as Belgorod, an atmosphere of frontline fear has descended on towns and villages that Russian officials say have come under Ukrainian shelling.

“We are living in the conditions of de facto war,” said Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov on Russian state television this week broke with the Kremlin’s usual euphemism of “special military operation” for the conflict. “Like it or not, this war is on. The enemy enters.”

“People ran out of the buildings, threw belongings in the car and drove away fast, fast,” said Elena, a resident of Belgorod, who asked not to use her last name for fear of breaking Russian rules. draconian laws of speech. “It was scary; the city has emptied out.”

On Thursday, Russia claimed heavy shelling by Ukrainian forces damaged Shebekino’s town hall, just a few miles from the border, knocking out power and forcing an evacuation. Russian officials also said security forces had repelled an attempted raid by fighters against the Kremlin, even when the fighters posted video footage, they said they showed battles on the outskirts of the city. Neither party’s account could be confirmed.

Fears have grown since the fighters, two Russian paramilitary groups that joined Kiev, were staged a brutal two-day attack in a nearby area, briefly occupying several villages. Ukraine publicly denied involvement, but the fighters said they were supported by Ukrainian authorities.

The seriousness of the Shebekino attacks was indirectly acknowledged by the Kremlin, whose spokesman told reporters on Thursday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia receive regular updates from the city.

Russian border regions have been goals of rocket attacks and raids since the start of the war, but the intensity of the attacks has increased since Kiev drove the Russian army out of northeastern Ukraine last fall and moved Ukrainian troops to Russia’s borders.

Belgorod Governor Gladkov said this on Thursday that hundreds of residents of Shebekino, mainly elderly people and families with children, were evacuated. a video posted on a Shebekino community page purporting to show activists evacuating children from the city. The evacuation Mr Gladkov announced would be the largest such measure in the country in decades.

Another community page dedicated to Shebekino pleaded for help in evacuating elderly relatives from the city. “Please help evacuate Grandpa from Shebekino, I beg you,” a user identified as Victoria wrote on the VK social network.

The Kremlin has been largely silent about the situation in Russia’s border regions and Mr Putin only commented briefly about this week’s drone strikes on Moscow, telling a reporter that Russian defenses had proved adequate.

Following the bombing in Kiev on Thursday, Ukrainian authorities canceled some Children’s Day events to protect people and clean the streets.

Yaroslav, whose wife was one of the victims in Kiev, told broadcaster Suspilne that he had found her bleeding next to a blanket she had brought for their own 9-year-old daughter. He said the girl was not injured, but saw what happened to her mother.

Reporting contributed by Andrew E. Kramer, Oleg Matsnev, Alina Lobzina, Dmitry Khavin, Nicole Tung, Victoria Kim And Anushka Patil.