People of war

For more than 10 months, our organization has been documenting the war crimes of the Russian aggressor. We have collected over a hundred such facts. Murders of civilians, rape, mutilation. Shelling of civilian objects, destruction of hospitals and using of prohibited weapons. More than 50 victims and witnesses told us what Russia brought to Ukrainian land.

Iryna Lyubchenko

On the eighth day, the shelling began and something flew into this five-story building. Some guys came in and said - "We need men who are not nervous. Everyone else should go to the shelter, don't go out anywhere, neither to the toilet, everyone should lie down. Just lie down and be silent”. So, the guys came out. It hit a five-story building and injured many people.

These guys immediately started calling the emergency services. There was a young man with us. He was twenty-six - twenty-seven years old. He worked in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. His family, his mother also worked there. His wife, daughter, sister, father, grandmother. Everyone were in this school. Together with me.

He's such a good guy. He worked on it. He immediately said - "Guys, let's go". They evacuated people. The woman was brought in pieces. Do you understand?

My car. Here I have a house. It can no longer be called a house. Eight hits. Eight. There is no house. The slabs are  collapsing just now. But they still hit him. Bastards.

All cars were broken. I was just lucky. First entrance of the building is my. There was a first hit - the stairs from the ninth to the second or third floor were destroyed. There was no passage at all. My neighbor has no door. A rocket flew in, there is a vestibule, two apartments. My apartment and my neighbor's apartment.

A rocket flew into the sixth floor above my neighbor. The neighbor became without door - without anything. It was a horror for me.

There is Heroes of Labor, and there is Northern Saltivka. Heroes of Labor was one “planet”. The North was another “planet”. The cars were bombed. With people burned inside. It's a bunch of houses. Our emergency workers, rescuers, soldiers cannot advance because shooting.

They shoot constantly. Houses have been collapsed, people were remaining in basements. It's just horrible. There are really no words.

My wife and I decided to leave the city of Kharkiv. It was the first of March. My wife and two children and I walked to the Kharkiv railway station. On the way we saw broken cars, destroyed. In one of the cars I saw a dead body - covered. It was covered with a cloth, there was blood - not a very pleasant sight.

There was shelling, some people died. The friend laid dead for a long time. There was no one to pick him up. Buchma Street, 42. It was February 26. People were walking down the street. The shelling began. Artillery began - people died.

They were torn to pieces, and they were lying there and no one could come. They were lying for a long time. They were lying there for about five days. The worst thing was when the planes arrived. I already thought that everything would consist like cards.

We would be buried there. Airplanes bombed the nearest tram depot. Half of the tram fleet was destroyed. This depot is located between North Saltivka and Saltivka. This is Leo Tolstoy Street. Saltivsk tram depot.

In fact, the entire Northern was affected. Name any street: Natalia Uzhvai, Druzhba narodov. There is nothing left of the North. There are completely black houses. It is good if the house is just standing with broken windows. Burnt. They stand failed practically from the roof. Some has one side of the house collapsed.

Some has a failed middle. Northern Saltivka is a huge district. Sleeping district. I don't understand why the war started from the sleeping areas. At the moment when people were hiding in the metro, they fired at the Heroiv Pratsi metro station, they fired at the Studentska metro station, because "Barabashova" is nearby.

The Akademik Pavlov subway was fired upon.  They fired at the Saltivka subway at the moment when there were a lot of people. Near the Akademika Pavlov metro station - there is such a very large "Nova Poshta", where in the first days humanitarian aid has been given to people. To help people somehow. A shell flew right there. Moreover, there are no facilities there, no military facilities.

There is a large building of "Nova Poshta". Many people were carried out from there. An acquaintance stood in this line. He says about eight people were killed. He was taken away with eighteen shrapnel wounds. His mother is a doctor. By some miracle, she took an ambulance. She brought him to Lviv to rescue. He is treating in Lviv now.

He had very serious problems with his leg. He says - "There were a lot of people like me". Wounded people. You understand what humanitarian aid is. It was a lot of people. Practically, there are neither left who were not injured. People were taken out the best as could. Because the ambulances could not cope with this volume of people.

Passing through the street, we turned into my grandmother's street. Neighbors said women was killed here. She went out to feed a kitten. A shell bursted - a woman died.

Lyptsi is under occupation. Many of our friends live there. It borders the russian border. People are afraid to get out of their basements. Everyone - who was in the ATO, the military – were taken out on the first day of the occupation. No one knows their fate till now. They were not allowed into Ukraine, they were taken to russia.

People were loaded in families. It was not known where they were being taken - there was no connection. People without phone and without food... These food packets - as they say, that the russians bring and feed them - there is no such thing. People were left without a pension, without money during the occupation.

All the stories about the russians are bringing them food packets, about everything is fine, "russian world" - there is no such thing. We don't know this yet, because there is an occupation there - but this is probably the second Bucha. There is an arbitrariness there. I have a private house. It was immediately occupied on the first day.

When the war started, my husband and I were in our son's apartment. But since the war, we decided to go home and hide there. We called security - all phones were turned off. There was no connection. We didn't understand. We called the neighbors - there was no connection.

Then a man who left the village of Bobrivka told us the village is occupied. There is no electricity, gas - nothing. It is impossible to leave. My neighbors spent forty-one days in occupation. Without electricity, gas, food. They didn't let him in, didn't let him out. People were closed, as if in a trap.

There are 500 houses. 140 residents remained there. We still cannot get there or find out information. People say houses are destroyed there.

Everything is mined. Only a field remained of 500 houses.

My neighbor called and said - "Olena, we have no more houses."

The market was shelled on Heroes of Labor Street. It burned every day. Heroes of Labor Street was on fire.

They hit the school, which is closer to "Caravan" as Studentska street to cross. They hit the second floor. There was a hole, probably one and a half meters long, in the wall. More than one projectile hit there. Student Street was shelled. The sixteen-story building was burning - the upper floors. The tire repair shop, next to the subway, was also on fire.

It burned very hardly - because there were tires. Heroes of Labor Street was on fire. There we have a market and a round market. The shops are small. It flew there every two or three days. These tents were burning very hardly.

Tents were extinguished. It flew there again in two or three days. A rocket fell on the square. It destroyed all the houses there. Windows, doors - everything flew out. Shells hit some houses. They became ruins. I specifically went to where the smoke was coming from and took pictures. There were ambulances. People were taken out of residential buildings. Sixteen-story, nine-story buildings.

The school is next to my house. One hundred and thirty nine school number. It was covered by "Grad". More than one projectile got there. Windows were broken there and people injured their hands and faces by shrapnel. They are in the hospital now. The school is across the street. My house stands, Hvardiitsiv Shyronintsiv street - one more house.

The School. People were hiding there too. One hundred and forty school number. More than one projectile also flew there. I do not think that they made mistake. People suffered shrapnel wounds there too.

My wife has a classmate who lives at KhTZ. Her mother had very severe facial injuries. When I went to see the Heroes of Labor street, where the house was burning, I passed by the kindergarten where my children went. "Silpo" stands, then the house too. The kindergarten was destroyed. Two shells hit the second floor. It is small - two-story building. It was in the morning. At ten to eleven o'clock. The usual shelling began. Shells were exploding nearby. I heard that it was very close. It was getting closer, closer and closer. It got into houses. The explosion was very strong. It flew into our house - the windows were broken, the wall was destroyed.

I came out of my room. It is on the other side of the house. Two rooms, a corridor in the middle. I went into the kitchen and saw the windows were broken. The windowsill was broken. There was a big hole in the wall under the windowsill. In the corridor I found an iron fragment, the size of a fist. The fragment pierced the wall and hit the refrigerator handle. There were two more small fragments. The wall has got dents in the corridor. Potholes. Then, when I left, our house was hit on the second floor from the other side. There were two wounded.

When all it started I lost my apartment because it was hit by a shell. I lost my job. Because the car was also bombed out.

Three-rooms flat.

There were trucks in the parking lot and a rocket hit them. That is, the trucks that were parked there, the cars, were blown away. The explosion was very serious. We left the basement, looked - half of the house is gone. They hit the middle entrance of the house. We have three entrances. It got to the middle entrance - half the house is gone. We lost everything.

People died who did not go down. When the projectile hit this middle entrance, there were a lot of people. There were children and adults. People suffered and died.

I saw a russian armored personnel carrier. It was standing near "Nikolskyi". This is a new shopping center that was opened recently. It was opened in the summer. I saw this armored personnel carrier near the Korolenko library. I didn't know what to do. I stood and couldn't move, then I realized that I had to move somehow. I moved back.

I didn't know what would happen to me. What was on their mind. I slowly walked. I was waiting for something to happen to me. That I would be shot in the back. After all, if they did not want to do evil, they would not come to my city. They wouldn't come here. But they came for something - not with good intentions.

They arrived on an armored personnel carrier. There were dead. Morgues were overcrowded in Kharkiv. It is not known who is there.

Bodies lay outside. Bodies pieces. Blood.

Then they bombed the Kharkiv Cancer Center. It is near the aircraft factory. It was under fire.

Private sector, where my daughter built a two-story house a year ago. The neighbor is not far away. A direct hit knocked down a neighbor. Neighbors digged out in the morning.

I also saw shells falling into neighboring houses. Roofs and houses were torn from these explosions. Actually, I saw it happen.

When a shell hits the house, the roof explodes, the house is blown to pieces. On the last night, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth, there was a very heavy shelling. Eighteen houses were damaged. Also a projectile hit my wing. It was destroyed. When we were sitting in the house, the door fell out and the porch was blown to pieces.

When we came out of the house in the morning, there was no door in the corridor. And there was no porch. As if a tank drove by. The wife almost turned gray from this. If I'm not mistaken, it's the street of the Paris Communards. There, on the corner, the house was destroyed.

The front side of the next house was demolished. Further along the street, the corner of the house was destroyed. A projectile hit the water pipe.

Central pipe. The projectile made such a ditch that the whole yard was flooded with water. There was also a lot of destruction in the house opposite. It can happen in an hour or two - so much destruction. So many houses were shelled - probably twenty houses. That's true.

We spent the whole night in the cellar. In the morning we got out. A shell hit the barn. The shed burned down. We went out into the yard - there were large holes in the fence from shrapnel.

We were just surprised - it was metal fence. What could be the cause of such holes?

We entered the garden - there were two large pits from these shells. When I got home, I saw what happened from these blast waves. It was a horror. The windows all fell out - they just lay on the ground.

One man came. He came here with me - not to the street, but to such an entrance hall. We heard a loud explosion. I even had a cigarette slip out of my hand. The man sat down. It was near us, on Moskovskiy Prospekt, the Academy of State Administration. There was an explosion. When Sasha was accompanying me to Lviv, we were walking across Moskovskii Prospekt and saw the Academy.

A bomb was dropped there - a piece was torn off. A piece of the building was torn off. The blast wave had a very large radius.

Windows, doors flew out. The further we went to the center, there were also destroyed shops, glass everywhere. Broken glass was lying all over the ground.

People in the subway told that not far from the subway, a woman went outside to sweep near her house. A shell fell. Shell fragments hit her in the stomach. Her daughter worked as a nurse and was in the hospital at that time. The woman was not taken to the hospital - she died.

My husband wanted to join the Territorial Defense and went to the Administration. Before that, a bomb also hit our Kharkiv Administration. Eyewitnesses said that this explosive wave threw people like leaves. They flew in the air like leaves. There was such a strong explosion.

Everything was mined at KhTZ. These mines were dropped by parachutes. A rocket can fall, when people stand in line for bread. Was showed that the woman's leg was torn off.

Airplanes started flying above us. We live in Kholodnaya Gora - this is the area of the Ozeryansk church. There is a prison nearby - its building was completely destroyed. Kholodnohirska street is not far away - there is a military tank school.

The corner of the house was completely destroyed. We went to "Klas" supermarket. All the windows in the store are broken. There are no windows in stores. Shopping row - there was no glass at all.

The newly built "Nikolskyi" shopping center was completely destroyed. Almost everything in "Barabashov" was burned. There was smoke and black ash in our yard and on our roof as the wind blew our way. Everything was flying towards us. "Barabashova" completely burned down. It was bombed three times. Later - "Feldman", Gorky Park.

I went outside - literally 25-50 meters away - and here was this building destroyed where the prison is. On the Poltavskyi Shliakh Street.

A projectile hit the school on other days. There was also a shell outside my house the day before yesterday. A shell fell near our house. I found out five men and a pregnant woman were killed.

We lived on the North Street previously, one daughter has an apartment there, and the other one too. The projectile also hit there. The eldest daughter had a three-room apartment with her husband's parents. A shell hit. I don't know what happened to the apartment.

The younger daughter took out a loan. She bought an apartment before the New Year. A projectile got there too. The enemy kills children, innocent people. What objects are bombed?

Are kindergartens and schools military facilities? Are shopping centers military facilities? Are parks and zoos military facilities? What are they bombing? The zoo was bombed, the animals were killed!

The "Fairytale" market, located on Poltavskyi Shlyakh Street, was destroyed. The projectiles hit a house adjacent to Poltavskyi Shlyakh Street. The entire corner of the house almost destroyed. The whole house is full of holes. About ten meters of hole.

On the other hand, there is a "Klas" supermarket. He was also fired upon. The building of the Pre-trial Detention Center was destroyed. I don't know how many prisoners there were.

Then the shelling began, they bombarded so that it buzzed every day. Several times a day. I don't remember the date, at ten in the morning I talked to my son on the phone. I heared a buzz like a fighter jet is flying over the house. The rocket passed over the house and fell into the area of the railway station.

The explosion was so powerful that the house seemed to "walk" in the private sector. How many people died. The girl was walking with blood on her leg. I asked her. It turned out that people were standing in line for products. A projectile hit. An elderly woman's leg was torn off. Blood got on the girl.

An elderly woman was lying under the shop, her leg was lying out of the way. We were renovating my friend's house in Tsirkuny. This house no longer exists. There is also an acquaintance who lived nearby in Tsirkuny. They also had a house with his father. A shell hit it and it was blown to rubble.

Once there were a lot of wounded, so I stayed overnight in the hospital. When I returned in the morning, I saw that the window in the ward, where I spent the night all this time, was damaged by shrapnel. After making a tour of the department, we found several more windows damaged by shrapnel.

When I was carrying wood from the fire, after preparing food for the sicks, our department came under an airstrike. The first strike was a rocket with a direct hit on the department - a few meters from me. The second blow was an aerial bomb that fell near the maternity hospital, next to which our department is located.

This blow had devastating consequences - almost all doors and windows were damaged, a huge hole in the ceiling. It is scary to imagine what would have happened if the patients had stayed in the department.

We ran to the car, sat down, put on stickers, and drove to "Obzhora". There were a lot of cars, a very large convoy was "moving".

At that moment, when we were driving, a mortar was working. The mortar worked so violently. When we left here for the center, for "Obzhora", there were a lot of corpses. These are local residents - they are not military. I did not see the military - there were corpses of ordinary civilians. Someone was covered - someone no.

We drove up there, stood in a column. The column moved. We were at the beginning of the column. Maybe the fifth or sixth car was ours. We moved. We drove to "Sport City". We did not have time to get to "Sport City" - because the mines "went off". They fell right in front of the cars.

Сars began to drive around these explosions, these waves, these pits. The mines were continueing to fall - you understand, first, second, third. We hit the brakes. We understand that the fourth one can get to the car. тWe looked up - in front of us two cars were already on fire. Cars with the inscription "Children".

There were indeed women driving. Children were sitting inside. Those who were further behind us, they turned to the side of the road and made a sharp turn. They started to go back. Behind them are mines - one by one. While we were driving, mines were exploding behind us.

People were burned alive. They were sitting in the car and could not get out. I looked around and wanted to understand. When a mine flies into a car, it explodes and catches fire. We saw it all burn. This was a terrible explosion. Everything flew out and broke into pieces.

The roof of the first car hit by the mine was blown off. It was such an explosion. Houses burned every day. There are three or four houses around us. Five entrance house was destroyed by an aerial bomb. This building was folded in the middle - from the ninth floor to the first floor.

As far as we know, there were people when the bomb fell. It was like this - two entrances were standing, but the one in the middle was not. Some ruins. That's all.

Houses were burning, very burning. There were flights under our house. Exactly under the basement where we hid. Two "Hrads" fell.

There were a lot of corpses. We buried people. I personally and other men buried two soldiers and two local residents who died there from shrapnel. We walked for water a few blocks away. We walked under fire. Went down twice. I said - "I will not go for the third time". Because it is very dangerous. Constantly falling face down in the mud, falling next to human corpses!

It was unpleasant and very scary. But I wanted to drink.

I went to fetch water with three men. Took two bottles. When we got water and went back, we lay down on the ground because "arrivals" has been there. Probably times out of ten. When I fell, the man pushed me. When it flew at us, it boomed - we fell. I fell on my face next to the old man. He was dead. I saw his terrible broken face and I cried all night.

The bomb landed in a neighboring yard on March 17. Direct hit. Complete destruction, seven people died. Our neighbors died. Our roof was damaged by the strong blast wave, the double-glazed windows were broken. Destroyed everything.

You can see in the photos. It became impossible to live there. We have a one-year-old child. My son and I ate outside. Although it was frosty, the sun was shining during the day. The husband says - "I'm going to the house." But he did not have time to eat - this bomb arrived.

It happened behind the house - and it was not even heard at first. To be honest, I haven't even heard.

Something hit me on the head. It looked like a piece of tile. The husband said - "I don't see anything." Everything was covered in blood. He came out covered in blood.

He lost a lot of blood. All his clothes and pants were covered in blood. How much hydrogen peroxide did we pour! The bleeding did not stop. The neighbor took us to the hospital in his Zhiguli car. The husband's wound was stitched up there.

We walked back. These "kadyrovtsy" were already in the hospital. We saw how the tanks drove. It was very scary. It seemed that we were going - and they would shoot us in the back. We stopped, turned around - so that they could see that the man was wounded.

My husband and I came from the hospital, it took us two hours to get there. I had to take new clothes because everything was covered in blood. Even the underpants were covered in blood. When we entered, we saw our neighbor lying dead near the flowerbed where the roses were growing.

I tell my son - "Run after these men. I will not lift the corpse. It is heavy. They moved the corpse. They put him on the carpet and moved him to the apartment. They helped us open the gate. Because the gate was blocked. We have a garage in the house.

They fired at the buses with people in front of us. All the cars were forced to go in the detour. The Ukrainian army was already in this bombed-out village. They ordered us not to get out of the car. "Grad" arrived at that time. If we were a little further, they probably would have fallen on our cars.

To drive such way, and to be covered here. The car moved ahead. It was not visible who was in it. Then the frightened girl screamed. Apparently, she also run away from under the bombs. Children react differently. We have a one-year-old child, she was scared.

The Pravoberezhny district was fired upon in the city of Mariupol. The eastern part of the city. That is the area where I lived. There were hits to the nearby entrance. The windows in our apartment were blown out. The loggia and the apartment block were completely blown away.

We were all in the house at that moment. All of us remained alive and healthy. When we approached the window, I saw shells hit the shops, I saw a shell hit the kindergarten. We were shelled upon by "Grad". More than thirty people died and many people were injured at that time.

Dead people were lying on the streets. They were closed as best as could.

At that moment, a kind of revolution occurred the head, that in the twenty-first century they can fire at a sleeping residential area, in which there is nothing - there are just houses in which people live.

It was shelled without any reasons or explanations. That's all. I went to my neighbor, her window was open due to a draft. I went, opened the window, looked out and saw the arrival of bombs in three apartments in the building opposite. It were the ninth floor, the seventh floor and the second floor.

Air strikes began, the city center was constantly bombarded. We didn't leave the house at all, because constantly, every ten or fifteen minutes, we heard how a plane flew by, and we heard a hit. At that moment, they started bombing the city center, there were hits near the Third City Hospital.

When the Central Market was bombed, the windows were blown out at a distance of more than one kilometer. At that moment, the mother of the hostess, with whom we were staying, lived there. She came from home, what she was wearing. That's just what she was wearing, that's what she came in.

The next morning, the men took warm clothes and documents. The hospital was also hit. We saw the photos. Serhii, the driver who drove us, showed us the photos he took from the window. There is a house, and across from it is the city hospital. He showed the consequences of an airstrike - a pit into which a KAMAZ could have climbed and it would not have been visible.

In the Mykolayiv region, medical facilities were affected. Only in April 2022, as a result of russia's military aggression, 13 such institutions were damaged. The microdistrict, where the Oncocenter is located, is a sleeping area in the eastern part of the city. Many medical facilities are concentrated there.

On April 4, the territory of our Cancer Center came under fire. Fortunately, the workers were able to hide in the bomb shelter and were not injured by the explosions. Although both the windows of the Cancer Center and the cars that were parked near the facility were destroyed by the blast wave. Patients were also affected. More than ten wounded were lying on the territory of the facility. They were taken on stretchers and cars to the reception department of the oncology center for medical assistance.

Our radiological building, which was in the final stage of major repairs at the beginning of February, was damaged. With new, modern equipment and fully ready to receive patients. Not to mention the operating room, the windows of which were hit by a fragment of a cluster projectile.

On the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, two rockets hit. In "Southern Bug". This is almost the center of the city. Shopping center "Southern Bug" and nearby "33 square meters" - such a plumbing store.

Everything threw up. Tiles, windows, frames were destroyed. People stayed up all night - they hid. Only the siren can be heard we have went to the basement since the 25th of February.

It happened that there was no siren and the shells were flying. There was also such a thing. It was around nine o'clock in the evening - three shells flew by. One fell two hundred meters from my house. "Furshet" shopping center. Everything turned upside down there.

A shell fell near the wall of "Furshet". "Furshet" has standed since my birthday. I will be 42 this year. The ceilings and floors were destroyed. It's good that it happened at night - only the guards were there. The guards were injured.

Such things flew out there - a lot of them. There is a yard behind "Vodoliy" at the address 325 Zhovtnevy Avenue, block 5. There were nine-story buildings with the letter P. It was in the middle that the projectile hit and flew everywhere. In a week, on the other side, the fifth floor was hit. The roof collapsed. Destroyed up to the second floor.

It flew to "Furshet" and to the maternity hospital. The maternity hospital is five-story, huge.

They said that apparently there were victims. About twenty wounded. Pregnant women were there.

They suffered and were victims. This hospital is called "Doctor Samoilovych". It was badly damaged. Because in the morning they asked our men to help carry people.

It was necessary to cover the five-story building with a pellicle. Everything that was in the maternity wards was blown to pieces.

Childbirth tables, where women lie, this is all for newborn children - everything were in pieces. There was nothing left. The Zhovtnevy district ends - and the villages begin. Houses were also destroyed in Balabanivka. The man left - he has a large family. He worked abroad. All his life he worked for children. He built a three-story house. The first shell hit this house. Everything was destroyed. There are twenty destroyed houses in Balabanivka. A projectile flew to the Fenix market, two hundred meters from the ATB . Destroyed everything.

There are also Department store. Many shells flew there. Destroyed houses. I got a call. My son friends with a boy. His parents went out on the balcony to smoke. Splinters covered this person. I know fragment  pierced his lungs, and they couldn't get fragment out of him.

A shell fell on our plot in the garden. Than a neighboring boy was wounded by a shrapnel. They ran to the basement, I saw and heard - explosion after explosion. I saw a mushroom like this over my territory. We managed to run to the basement. We went out after this bombing and asked the neighbors what happened.

We were told: a child was wounded in the shoulder by a shrapnel. Surname Kilichuk. My classmate was killed in my village Pohorilovka. Vera Biryukova. With her younger brother and sister. Her mother was in a coma. But as I found out, she did not survive.

Only one sister remained and there were four children in the family. She lived near Bashtanskaya highway on Shevchenko Street. They were just drinking tea when a shell flew. The person is gone. I don't know how all this can be imagined. I saw her at the village council. Now I realize that she was - and now she has been gone. I can't even put into words all the emotions I felt.

One morning we came out of the basement and saw that the wall was gone. The house was riddled with shrapnel holes. I was afraid for my family, gathered them - and we fled to the station. A piece of rocket inside the hospital. He stayed there. All the gates at the hospital were broken. What a blow it must have been to break through the gate.

That rocket remained in the yard. In the central part there were large manazins. One rocket hit a hospital, and the second hit a large shopping center. There was practically nothing left. There was a lot of blood there. Those who were there at that time - they suffered. Words cannot convey.

A man called from Mykolaiv. He lives on the outskirts of the city where the cluster munition were shot. The entire area was bombed until four in the morning. He sat with his mother in the basement, and only at the beginning of five in the morning they left basement. His father was not around. He was killed. He called for help in the morning, they arrived and took him away on a stretcher.