Julia Prudyus watched in silence as an excavator dug into the broken concrete that was a nine-story apartment building at 357 Centralna Street in Borodyanka, a city northwest of Kiev. Ms. Proudyus knew that five of her relatives were found dead under the rubble, buried in the basement of the building, which had failed to protect them from a direct Russian airstrike. “My mother, my brother, his wife and her parents are all in there,” she said softly, with tears in her eyes as she watched the machine pull the wreckage for the ninth day in a row. Rescuers have recovered 20 bodies from under 357 Centralna, but so far none of them are missing members of Mrs Proudyus’s family. On Friday afternoon, the six most recently recovered victims were laid to rest in black bags at the foot of the building as a weeping woman examined each one. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Centralna Street was where people came to shop, shop, and dine out of this working-class community 90 minutes by car from the Ukrainian capital. After a month of Russian occupation, Centralna Street is a 4.7 km long area of misery. It is a landscape full of spheres of family homes, burnt shops and entire apartment buildings that have been reduced to rubble. It is a place that is still fighting, two weeks after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kiev region, to count its dead. The smell of burnt spreads throughout the city. Ukrainian officials say Borodyanka, which had a population of 13,000 before the war, is the most radically damaged part of Ukraine after regaining control of Russia. Ukrainian leaders and international visitors have hailed the devastated city as a giant crime scene – evidence, along with mass graves discovered in the nearby city of Bucha, of war crimes committed by the Russian military against Ukrainian civilians. Invasion troops seem to have placed particular emphasis destroying symbols of Ukrainian culture and statehood. The specialized music school in the city has been turned into a pile of red bricks and twisted metal. A marble monument to Ukrainian soldiers has been shattered into three pieces. A giant bronze bust of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s most beloved poet, was shot in the temple, in execution style. In an effort to understand the extent of what happened in Borodyanka, The Globe and Mail spoke with dozens of Centralna Street residents this week, gathering stories about what they and their neighbors cheated on. According to their testimonies, at least 60 civilians died on this road alone during the month that Borodyanka was under Russian military control. This number is almost certainly a significant underestimation. Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskiy, said during a visit to Borodyanka that it was impossible to say how many people had died here, as hundreds were still missing. Many of them are believed to be buried under four apartment buildings on Centralna Street: buildings 353, 357, 371 and 429. “There is no explanation as to why this and that and not that,” said Gerashchenko, pointing to 355. which continues to be located between its two demolished neighbors. At 357 Centralna Street, rescuers are searching for bodies among the wreckage. ANTON SKYBA / The Globe and Mail Rescue workers continued to dig into the basements of the buildings this week. They could only estimate how many corpses may have been inside. There is no hope of finding survivors six weeks after the airstrikes that destroyed apartment buildings. During the month of Centralna Street pain, sometimes death came suddenly to entire families at once. In other cases, people were found dead only after the Russian soldiers left. In some cases it was not clear how and when the inhabitants died. What makes the unpredictable violence in Borodyanka particularly confusing is that the city has no obvious military value. The nearby Kiev suburbs of Bucha and Irpin were the scene of heavy fighting as Russian troops tried to seize the capital before Moscow suddenly changed strategy and redeployed its forces for an attack in the east of the country. Hostomel, another heavily damaged city, was targeted because of its strategic airport. Borodyanka, meanwhile, appears to have been shot accidentally. Residents say the first Russian military column met with almost no resistance as it entered the city on February 26. A second column entered on 27 February was confronted by Ukrainian fire, but the fighting ended quickly. Globe’s Mark MacKinnon reports from Borodyanka, one of the cities near Kyiv that has suffered the most damage from Russian attacks. Interviews with survivors show that at least 65 people were killed in one street alone, while hundreds are still missing after Russian forces withdraw. The Globe and Mail Subsequently, Russian forces in Borodyanka appeared sharp. They had lost comrades. A damaged Russian armored personnel carrier is clumsily wedged into the rubble of a hardware store at 307 Centralna. A discarded Russian military uniform is found in a small pile of rubbish next to the building. Residents say that on February 28, a column of armored vehicles drove to Centralna, accidentally firing on houses that were largely empty because most residents had remained in their underground shelters since the first Russian troops arrived. The airstrikes targeting apartment buildings took place on March 1st and 2nd, as Russian forces escalated the bombing of civilian areas around Ukraine. No one who lived on Centralna Street survived completely unscathed. On much of the road, it is rare to see a house that has not been hit by light weapons or worse. Even if their homes were spared, the inhabitants had to survive on less food, water and electricity and endure the humiliating mistreatment at the hands of the occupying army. Almost every home seems to have been looted by food, alcohol, electronics and anything else that the invading soldiers thought might have value. Numbers 1 and 1a Centralna, at the eastern end of Borodyanka, are the houses next door to Tatiana and Alexander Makienko, a couple with children, and Lydia Maksiuta, a grandmother. They survived from the first days of the occupation hidden, along with 800 other residents of the area, in a psychiatric care house a short walk away. At Centralna 1, Lydia Maksiuta sitting on the couch in her living room. Anton Skyba / The Globe and Mail At one point, Makienko was allowed to return home to pick up some things. But first it was done by the Russian forces stripped to the street to prove he had no weapons and no military tattoos. He entered the house to find out that it had been looted by Russian soldiers, who were clearly staying there. “They told us, ‘We came here to free you,’” Makienko said. “They also said that we have very good living conditions. That’s how they got all our things. “ Their situation in the nursing home deteriorated when the installation was occupied by a unit of fighters from Chechnya, an area with signs of battle in southern Russia, commanded by warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. The 80 fighters – led by Colonel Daniil Martynov, one of Kadyrov’s most feared commanders – took control of food and water supplies, leaving only one drop for civilians hiding in the building and saying no one was allowed to go. “We were taken hostage,” said Alla Kryvoshenko, the deputy director of the care home. He said the Chechens had tried to force Marina Hanitska, the director, to record a video thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for “liberating” Borodyanka, but she refused. “When he came back to us, he fainted. “She was really under pressure because until the last minute she thought she was going to be shot,” said Krivoshenko. Further west below Centralna, a wreckage field, including a refrigerator with a broken door and a pair of jeans hanging awkwardly from a nearby fence post, is what is left of house number 30 and the six people they lived inside. Four generations of the Simoroz family – from 80-year-old Nina to Paulina’s two-and-a-half-year-old great-granddaughter – were killed when either an air strike or an artillery shell hit their home on February 26. At 30 Centralna Street, a house was destroyed by a powerful explosion, which killed six people. Anton Skyba / The Globe and Mail The only survivor of the family was Paulina’s father, Ivan, a local police officer who was driving home when he was hit. He arrived at a scene of horror: dead family members scattered on their property and a neighbor. Only the tiny Paulina was still alive when Ivan arrived, but although he drove her straight to the hospital, she died a few minutes later. “The doctors said there was no case,” Ivan said. The body without legs of Ivan’s 18-year-old brother, Petya, was thrown over a fence in the yard of house number 32, where Valentina Orlova lives alone. The 68-year-old retired nurse said Russian soldiers later repeatedly raided her home and stole clothes and food. The house at 34, where Ms. Orlova’s sister lives, was severely damaged by a tank missile in a separate attack on February 27. “One of the Russians told me, ‘We were ordered to destroy you as a nation,’” he recalls. “I do not know how to name them. They are worse than the fascists. “They are barbarians.” A short walk down the road, no one knows how Anatoly Holoborodko died. Russian troops called his neighbors to 90 Centralna in mid-March and told them to bury the 60-year-old architect, who was living alone. “He was covered in blood, but the Russians did not tell us what happened,” said Mikhail Romanenko, one of the three neighbors who surrounded Mr Holoborodko.
