A Russian bombardment left 7 dead and 110 injured in downtown Cherniguiv (northern Ukraine), also hitting a university and a theater, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Telegram on Saturday. “A Russian missile hit right in the city center, in our Cherniguiv,” he wrote of the town 150 kilometers from Kiev, near the Belarusian border. “A square, the polytechnic university, a theater. An ordinary Saturday, which Russia has turned into a day of pain and loss. There are dead, there are wounded,” lamented the head of state. He also posted a video showing debris around a large Soviet-style apartment building, with cars parked around it and partially destroyed, smashed roofs and shattered windows.
“The enemy shelled the center of Cherniguiv. A priori, a ballistic missile,” the head of the Cherniguiv region, Vyacheslav Chaus, previously wrote on Telegram.
At the end of the morning, a few minutes after the airborne warning sirens had been triggered, a missile pierced the city theater from above, built in the center of a popular and very busy square. The corrugated sheets of the roof of the building are no more than a heap of shredded and twisted scrap metal. The window panes have been blown out but the exterior walls of the imposing building are intact.
On the two small streets surrounding the theater, the powerful blast of the explosion shattered all the windows of restaurants, cafes, shops and apartment buildings. Doors came off their hinges.
Shortly before, local authorities, referring to the firing of “a ballistic missile”, had urged the population to “stay safe” in this city spared from large-scale attacks after being briefly surrounded by Russian forces at the start of the invasion in February 2022.
The bombardment follows a string of battlefield successes claimed this week by Kiev and as the United States on Friday approved Denmark and the Netherlands to send F-16 fighter jets to the ‘Ukraine. It also happened when Volodymyr Zelensky was visiting Sweden, a country that has provided Kiev with thousands of anti-tank weapons and wants to join NATO despite virulent opposition from Moscow.
Talks with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson focus on “cooperation in terms of defense”, including the possible new delivery of Swedish infantry fighting vehicles CV-90s, detailed the Ukrainian president on Telegram.
“It is heinous to attack the main square of a big city in the morning when people are walking around, some going to church to celebrate a religious holiday,” the humanitarian coordinator of the city said in a statement. UN in Ukraine, Denise Brown. “I condemn this repeated pattern of Russian strikes on populated areas of Ukraine, causing death, mass destruction and growing humanitarian needs,” the official said.
“It has to stop,” said Ms. Brown again, hours after the deadly Russian strike on the city of Cherniguiv, in northern Ukraine.
‘People were screaming, crying, it was scary’: On her hospital bed, her legs still covered in blood, Diana Kazakova describes the ‘horror’ of the beating. She was in a fabric store when the missile went off. “The window completely fell on me. I fell […] Then I woke up, I was knocked out with shock,” she said, in a low voice. “When I came out, it was terrible. I didn’t know if the people lying on the ground were still alive or already dead,” she said outside her establishment.
At the bottom of a shrapnel-riddled car with a sunken engine, two pools of blood still glisten. On the front seats, two bloody airbags are deflated. Under the steering wheel, two sandals are still in front of the pedals. Parked in the street, the vehicle was thrown four meters further against the wall of a restaurant. On the sidewalk, strewn with broken glass for about fifty meters, a glazed bus stop only has its metal structure. Parked right next to it, a yellow bus has its windows shattered. He went from the station to the city cemetery. On the floor in the middle of the debris, a pair of glasses was abandoned.
In the parking lot in front of the columned facade of the theatre, around twenty cars all have their windshields smashed in. A little further, as if stopped dead in the square, a small van is riddled with impacts. The front seats bear traces of blood. A few meters away, a man in military uniform inspects a small pile of scrap metal and colored wires gathered on the ground, probably parts of the missile that have been found.
Across the street from the theater, Lioudmila, 24, came to help clear debris at a restaurant where she worked. She was “200 meters away when there was a very loud whistle and an explosion. I fell to the ground,” she says. There were “screams, there were a lot of dead, injured and ambulances. It’s horror, just horror,” said the young woman still in shock and her hands shaking.
She wonders about the programming of an exhibition on drones which was to take place in the city this Saturday. If she blames the Russians for firing the missile, “who allowed now, when the war is in the country, who allowed to hold a drone exhibition?” “, she wonders, making a possible link between the strike and the exhibition.
