Russian bombs and shells turn Ukraine border village into ‘hell’

Elderly residents of Velyka Pysarivka recount the devastation caused by Russian bombings in northeast Ukraine.

Wandering among the ruins, Svitlana Zavaly was searching desperately for anything that could be salvaged from the rubble of her home destroyed by a Russian bomb in north-east Ukraine.

“We have got nothing left,” said the 67-year-old resident of the village of Velyka Pysarivka that lies just five kilometres from the Russian border.

For around 10 days in mid-March, Russian bombs, shells, and rockets rained down on the village and others along the frontier, in apparent retribution for incursions into Russia by pro-Kyiv Russian fighters.

“We had everything. And in an instant, this happened. It’s a good thing we had left two days earlier,” said Ms. Zavaly, wearing an oversized mackintosh, a white scarf around her hair and orange gardening gloves.

She and her husband had returned just for the day. They are living temporarily in Okhtyrka, a town about 40 km west of Velyka Pysarivka, where they were evacuated like many other residents of the bombed areas.

On March 17, a neighbour who had stayed in the village that had a population of 4,000 before the war, called her at 4 a.m. “He said that a bomb had hit our house directly. And just like that we had become homeless,” the pensioner said, her eyes welling up.

Almost all the buildings in the centre of Velyka Pysarivka were destroyed in the waves of Russian strikes.