War between Russia and Ukraine. A policeman from Borodyanka, who suddenly lost his home and his entire family
- James Waterhouse
- BBC, Borodyanka, Ukraine
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I couldn’t figure out where this broken house was. Then I realized: this is because there was nothing left in the structure of the body that resembles a residential building.
Looking at a 26-year-old young man in uniform, standing on a shapeless chest of rubble, it is quite possible to contain the full scale of the devastation around him.
This material contains a description that may shock some readers.
“On February 26, I was at my workplace in the regional police department, we were talking on the street when we heard: bang!” Ivan recalls.
Russia had invaded Ukraine two days earlier, and citizens advancing on Kyiv attacked small towns in the Kyiv region.
“The earth shook. I started calling all my relatives: my wife, brother, mother, father, grandmother, and everyone was “out of network coverage”.
Ivan heard the sound of an exploding defeat and equipment, that he had hit something – not only what he knew for sure.
Together with his boss and numerous colleagues, Ivan reaches the house on the main street. The eyes of the police were presented with mangled chests of debris – the same picture that we saw today.
What were his thoughts at that moment?
“The horror is terrible. The war. Very, you don’t understand anything. You hope that someone else is alive somewhere, maybe he hid in the cellar.”
Soon neighbors and relatives arrived to help Ivan find survivors.
Ivan later found his mother, her body sprawled on top of the refrigerator. At 200 meters from him, he saw his younger brother. Body without legs and arms. Sitting next to his brother in the garden was his beloved dog.
Then he found Ivan’s grandmother – also dead, under her chest.
Aunt Ivana found his one-year-old daughter Polina – on the sofa, the baby was still breathing.
Then they found Ivan’s wife, and then his father. They were dead.
Polina died in the hospital a few hours later.
The day Ivan lost six members of his family.
According to the police, Ivan’s house became the first destroyed building in Borodyanka. the concentration of artillery fire in one of the most destroyed settlements in this war.
With incredible self-control, Ivan continues to point at the pile of stones that was recently the home of his family. He remembers everything to the smallest detail.
Somewhere through the wreckage, his bright tulips, planted by his grandmother, make their way.
If you look closely, you begin to see traces: the life of one shoe of Polina or a bathrobe hanging on a beam.
After the attack, Ivan took only three days off. He worked at nearby military checkpoints, helping to evacuate to safer areas. for this he was awarded the medal for gallantry and gallantry.
The local police station where Ivan served was one of the first to return to work after the Russian soldiers left the Kyiv direction. Since then, more than 1,200 bodies of civilians have been found around the world.
How can Ivan continue to live and work? What drives them?
Work, he admits, was a significant manifestation of the disease, but it also helps him with his personal grief. When lovers of Borodyanka, together with the police, began to work along the stream of the city, Ivan began to meet people who also experienced a similar tragedy.
Wait, friends and colleagues will also not overestimate whether it will be produced.
“Everyone in Borodyanka has some kind of trouble and problems,” says Ivan.
“He is an open, friendly, talented and focused person,” says Ivan’s boss, Vyacheslav Tsilyurik, head of the Borodyanka police department.
“For you to be qualified, one of Ivan’s main character traits is that in six years of work he has not taken a single day of vacation.”
“I have not met a very strong spirit of people,” Cyrulik, expressing the hope that he did not meet more people who might think that this could happen after a similar tragedy.
There is silence along the main road through town. When you see an entire apartment building with no facade or in ruins, it’s obvious how lifeless the place has become.
People’s apartments are on public display where the shells hit the neighboring building. Bookcases and trapezoidal kitchen tables are somehow frozen in time in some homes.
“People are completely demoralized,” says Vyacheslav. “They are learning to live in today’s reality.”
At some point, Ivan’s mask of self-control nevertheless slips – when he describes a place 30 kilometers from us. Six wooden crosses on freshly poured mounds of sand at a cemetery in the village of Peskovka.
Polina’s grave is easy to recognize among the rest by the toys. But what pierces you on the spot is the date of death common to all six: 02/26/2022. All the cruelty and irreversibility of this war is embodied in a single date engraved six times.
“When you come there, you cry all the time,” Ivan says, swallowing a lump in his throat.
Lyrics also contributed by Siobhan Leahy and Hanna Chornous
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