By Sergiy Karazy
UMAN, Ukraine (Reuters) – Serhii Lubivskyi looked up with tears in his eyes at the empty space where his neighbours’ flats stood before a Russian missile strike reduced them to rubble.
“No one is left,” Lubivskyi, 58, said on Friday in the central Ukrainian city of Uman.
He last saw his neighbours on Thursday evening. He was woken at 4.30 a.m. on Friday by an explosion that tore through part of his apartment block, killing at least 15 people.
Lubivskyi ran to the front door but couldn’t open it. His bathroom and kitchen were in tatters, dishes and doors smashed.
Smoke filled the air and he and his wife went out onto the balcony, where they stood until firefighters rescued them at 7 a.m.
“My flat is on the seventh floor … We felt the impact, we heard the explosion,” he told Reuters in faltering speech, struggling to make sense of an attack that turned half of his apartment block to rubble.
“My neighbours are gone, no one is left … only the kitchens were left standing,” he said, crying as he took a deep drag from a cigarette.
After tackling a blaze, firefighters clambered through the debris of the flats on Friday morning. At least one corpse was laid out in a body bag on a grass verge. People were gathered around looking on anxiously, hoping survivors would be found.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians in its “special military operation” in Ukraine, but this is no consolation for Lubivskyi.
“Russian bastards … worse than animals,” he said. “They don’t care, the more people they kill, the more they want to kill, just because we don’t want to work for them.”
(Reporting by Sergiy Karazy, Writing by Elizabeth Piper, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Peter Graff)
