Oksana Brin is weeping quietly as her father’s body is exhumed from his garden. A neighbour is rushing her family out of the house after finding an unexploded bomb in a bedroom, while another is staring at a torn-apart building he had called home and wondering how he had survived while his mother was severely injured.
This is Novasalovka after weeks of fighting and occupation by the Russians. Most of the village was no longer standing: swathes of smashed bricks, timber and glass lay on roads pitted with cavernous craters where massive bombs had been dropped. The village is just outside Chernihiv, 45 miles from the Belarus border, a key strategic location the Kremlin needed to capture to secure its supply lines and launch an all-out assault on Kyiv, 91 miles to the south.
Chernihiv, besieged and bombarded, hung on, and is now back in Ukrainian hands – a potent sign that Vladimir Putin’s plan supposed plan of “decapitation”, seizing the capital and driving out the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, has failed. But Chernihiv, a regional capital cut off from the rest of the country until now, has paid a terrible price for resistance. Around 550 civilians are estimated to have been killed, with hundreds more believed to be buried under rubble.
Seventy per cent of the city, one of great historic and religious heritage, has been demolished after days and nights of bombardment. More than half of the population of 290,000 have fled as the attacks have continued relentlessly, electricity and water have been cut off, and food stocks have dwindled.
A number of churches have been razed. One. which was used as a civilian shelter, by Russian airstrikes, the other by Ukrainian forces who claimed the Russians were using it as a base. But two famous cathedrals, the Transfiguration and St Catherine’s, have escaped damage.
The close proximity to the Belarus airfields have enabled the Russians to use their warplanes with deadly frequency – something they have been unable to do further inland due to the effectiveness of Ukrainian air defences, which have shot down a large number of aircraft.
Many of the injuries and deaths have been caused by the use of unguided air weapons of the type which caused such devastation in another of the Kremlin’s conflicts, in Syria. One of the most lethal examples in Chernihiv was the massacre of 47 people who had gathered at the city’s central square on 3 March when eight “dumb bombs” were dropped. There are also repeated claims that the Russians used cluster munitions, bomblets which have dropped on to the ground from the air unexploded, then set off on contact. Doctors at local hospitals showed fragmented jagged metal which had gone into bodies at close range.
Chernihiv’s Mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, has likened what has happened to two other places which have become synonymous with the savagery and sorrow of this war. “Our city resembles Bucha and Mariupol. People have been wondering whether they will survive until the next day… So many people have suffered”, he says.
Oksana Brin was trying to cope with her own personal grief in Novasalovka. Her 63-year-old father, Petro Kasinuk, was killed at his homes in an airstrike two weeks ago. So relentless were the attacks at the time that it proved impossible to take the body to the graveyard a quarter mile away. Instead, he was hurriedly buried in the garden.
On Wednesday, officials from the city council came to the half-demolished house to take Mr Kasinuk away for re-burial. He will be laid to rest at the civilian part of the village cemetery. The Russians had rolled tanks over the military section, making it look like a field ploughed with broken coffins and gravestones.
“He was such a stubborn old man. I begged him so many times to go somewhere safer, but he just refused to leave” Ms Brinn, tearful, says recalling her father. “I asked him to move in with me so that I could at least keep an eye on him. My house was just over there, but he would not agree to that either.”
“But my own house actually got bombed at the end, I had to hide in the basement with my six-year-old daughter as our home burned above us. I can just imagine, though, my father cursing away if he had given in and moved in with me and then the bombing took place”, she continues, the sobs turning to giggles.
A little further away Anton Ryzyk’s home had been pulverised during the same spate of intense strikes before Russian troops moved in. He had been sitting with his mother when the large house, which contained a number of flats, was bombed at around eight in the evening.
Mr Ryzyk, 33, escaped with minor injuries. His 64-year-old mother, Svetlana, was seriously wounded and has received emergency surgery in nearby Nizhyn after being evacuated.
“Our home was somewhere in there” he says, pointing at wreckage which had once been a building. “This was done by two planes. We could hear them coming. They dropped two bombs, turned and flew away, then came back and dropped two more. I remember being thrown through the air, but little more after that.
This map shows the extent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
“Why did they do this? I don’t know, maybe they thought that there were Ukrainian soldiers living around here, there was certainly a lot of military activity – or they simply did not care who they killed.”
Two doors away Liliana Rohova frantically calls the police, the army, the fire service and, at the end, the sanitation department to ask what was going to happen about an unexploded bomb she had found in her bedroom. It had been hard to spot under a pile of clothes, only the tailfin protruding from beneath a coat.
Ms Rohova, her 43-year-old husband, Oleksyi and the family had moved away from Novasalovka – after the initial attacks – to a cottage they owned in Petrushan, another village in the region. Russian soldiers took over Petrushan soon afterwards. “At first they were alright, but, when things started going badly for them, they started to suspect everyone of being spies ”, says Ms Rohova, also 43. “They began to arrest people, beat them up for no reason. They took some people away, we never saw them again.”
The Rohovas remained in Petrushan, keeping as low a profile as possible, they said, before returning to Novasalovka after it had been recaptured by Ukrainian troops.
Anton Ryzyik in front of what’s left of his house
Antonina Budnik, a patient in a hospital in Chernihiv, who lost a leg and may lose the sight in one eye
