{"id":51198,"date":"2025-04-26T04:23:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T04:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/51198\/"},"modified":"2025-04-26T04:23:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T04:23:11","slug":"death-debris-and-anger-about-trump-after-russias-strike-on-kyiv-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/51198\/","title":{"rendered":"Death, debris and anger about Trump after Russia\u2019s strike on Kyiv | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> Serhiy Parkhomenko\u2019s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and levelled by a Russian missile<\/a> early on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The unbearably red, eardrum-rupturing explosion<\/a> killed 12, wounded 87, gouged out windows and damaged roofs in dozens of nearby buildings of the tranquil, leafy neighbourhood in northwestern Kyiv.<\/p>\n

The shockwave caused Pakhomenko\u2019s steel entrance door to fly through his living room, flattening a cosy armchair he or his wife used to sit in during hundreds of earlier shellings.<\/p>\n

Luckily, they were in bed during the 1am [23:00 GMT on Wednesday] strike, the largest in Kyiv since the July 2024 bombing that damaged Ukraine\u2019s largest children\u2019s hospital<\/a> and killed 34.<\/p>\n

The Parkhomenkos hastily grabbed their documents and rushed outside. Serhiy also managed to drag his 68-year-old next-door neighbour out of the debris of his apartment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been really lucky,\u201d Parkhomenko, 60, a telecommunications expert, told Al Jazeera, standing next to his broken furniture and a flatscreen TV that somehow remained intact.<\/p>\n

What most confounds him has been the White House\u2019s inaction over the death and destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine since Donald Trump\u2019s re-election as United States president.<\/p>\n

Trump turns a \u201cblind eye\u201d to what Russian President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, Parkhomenko insisted.<\/p>\n

\"SerhiySerhiy Parkhomenko points to the steel door that flew across his living room after the Thursday morning missile strike [Mansur Mirovalev\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

The neighbour he had saved was sitting on a bench wrapped in a blanket, his face cut and bruised, and kept repeating: \u201cYou won\u2019t frighten us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though Trump wrote \u201cVladimir, STOP!\u201d in a social media post on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said a day earlier that Washington would refuse to mediate peace talks if Kyiv and Moscow don\u2019t start them within days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve shown them the finish line,\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday in the Oval Office after news of the strike on Kyiv. \u201cWe need both of them to say yes, but what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Close to Parkhomenko was an American who arrived in Kyiv to teach Ukrainian servicemen English and join Dobrobat, a volunteer group that rebuilds houses all over the war-battered nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel a moral obligation to come and help,\u201d Tom Satterthwaite, who once led researchers on salmon spawning in Oregon\u2019s dammed rivers, told Al Jazeera while hauling broken bricks and stucco downstairs.<\/p>\n

He said the White House had failed to uphold its security guarantees to Kyiv, according to the Budapest Memorandum.<\/p>\n

The 1994 deal prohibited Moscow, Washington and London from using military force against Ukraine in return for its abandonment of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Kyiv inherited the world\u2019s third-largest nuclear stockpile from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but agreed to transfer it to Russia in return for the security guarantees.<\/p>\n

\u201cUkraine got the shaft on the deal,\u201d Satterthwaite said.<\/p>\n

\"TomTom Satterthwaite, an American volunteer from Oregon, helps remove debris following Russia\u2019s missile strike on Kyiv on Thursday [Mansur Mirovalev\/Al Jazeera]
\nSaved by her glasses<\/p>\n

The destruction and debris after the shelling seemed shocking\u00a0<\/strong>to some foreign volunteers. But to the head of the Dobrobat volunteer group that invites and hosts them, the scene was familiar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got used to it,\u201d Dmytro Ivanov told Al Jazeera as other volunteers ran up and down the stairs in Parkhomenko\u2019s building. \u201cWe see it every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s strike on Ukraine on Thursday involved 70 missiles and 145 explosives-laden drones.<\/p>\n

The Kremlin\u2019s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that the strike had targeted \u201cmilitary and military-adjacent sites\u201d.<\/p>\n

But the destroyed house next door to Parkhomenko was about a kilometre away from the Antonov Serial Production Plant, a century-old aircraft manufacturer that once produced Mriya (Dream), the world\u2019s largest plane. The plant was burned down by Russian troops in February 2022.<\/p>\n

But the strike on Thursday did not hit the plant if that was indeed the target.\u00a0<\/strong>Instead, it damaged a dozen apartment buildings in the area.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe shockwave from the missile strike on Thursday damaged nearby cars and buildings in Kyiv [Mansur Mirovalev\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

Most of the victims were in the building next to Parkhomenko\u2019s, which was almost completely levelled.<\/p>\n

One of the survivors was Yelena, a blonde woman in her 40s whose impeccable hairdo, makeup and glasses contrasted with everything around her.<\/p>\n

The glasses are what saved her, seconds after the strike when she moved to grab them \u2013 and her upstairs neighbour\u2019s gas stove fell on the spot she\u2019d just been standing in.<\/p>\n

The blast collapsed the inner walls and ceiling of her first-floor corner apartment, while her husband Viktor saved his upstairs neighbour\u2019s two-year-old girl from the debris.<\/p>\n

She and her husband crawled outside to see their car mauled by the shockwave, while natural gas pipes in the building were \u201cbursting like ropes\u201d and neighbours yelled for help, she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

They spent hours helping them in the darkness and panic before finding out the girl\u2019s mother had been killed.<\/p>\n

\"RescueRescue workers continue to search for bodies in the debris of an apartment building in Kyiv, destroyed by a Russian missile on early Thursday [Mansur Mirovalev\/Al Jazeera]
\n\u2018There are still people down there\u2019<\/p>\n

At dawn, once the shock and adrenaline had worn off, Yelena realised her hair was full of broken glass, brick fragments and asbestos dust.<\/p>\n

She rushed to her relative\u2019s apartment to clean up and then came back to retrieve whatever was left of her belongings.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo apartment, no car, no stuff,\u201d she said with a sardonic smile, standing next to a dozen black garbage bags with her belongings and a microwave-sized power bank she\u2019d been using during blackouts caused by Russia\u2019s strikes on energy infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Rescue workers kept excavating the debris looking for survivors, while officials registered the residents. Communal workers unfurled and cut pieces of transparent plastic film to replace broken window glass.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are still people down there,\u201d Yelena said.<\/p>\n

The strike took place on the 99th day of Trump\u2019s second presidency whose boastful pledge to end Europe\u2019s bloodiest conflict since World War II \u201cwithin 24 hours\u201d has proved futile.<\/p>\n

The Kremlin has continued to produce conditions for a ceasefire<\/a> \u2013 and continues the ferocious shelling of Ukrainian cities almost daily.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say they hit military sites, but keep striking civilian areas,\u201d Viktor, a 59-year-old survivor whose face and scalp were cut by glass shards, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to his 90-year-old mother.<\/p>\n

Close by, a teenage boy wept and moaned uncontrollably on a bench, having just learned that his 17-year-old friend and his friend\u2019s parents had been found dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 Serhiy Parkhomenko\u2019s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[6178,32,299,126,12,332,7661,657,333],"class_list":{"0":"post-51198","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-conflict","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-features","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-vladimir-putin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114402364449937943","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}