Daria goes to get her phone. “It was 6:02 a.m. when the knocks woke me up. I’m sure of it »she said, showing the calls made immediately “to my mother, who lives in Europe, then my father – they were asleep – and finally to my sister, who answered. I was having a panic attack”. Early Saturday morning, three explosions rang out in Lukianivka, in central kyiv. A ballistic missile hit a populated area of the Ukrainian capital concentrated around a metro station, a market, apartment buildings, a factory and an office tower. The death toll, Saturday midday, stood at three deaths.
A few hours later, a police drone flies over the area where the ambulances have finished working and where saws and drills are already ringing. The strikes shattered nearby windows and windows, as well as a kiosk selling sweets and cigarettes. “There was no warning before the first strike. I was sleeping with my dog in the bed”continues Daria, 34, trembling in her studio on the twelfth floor of an old Soviet building, just a few dozen meters from the scene of the explosion. This shook the entire neighborhood two kilometers around.
“I was hiding in the bathroom when the second strike blew out all my windows”adds the young woman originally from Crimea and living in kyiv for seventeen years, where she is employed in a humanitarian association. Her dog hid behind the washing machine, she sat on the toilet, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “I had already repaired my windows in September 2023she said. An explosion, but I took refuge in the metro. » A friend came to help him attach a plastic sheet to his windows to protect his studio from the cold.
