DNIPRO, Ukraine — In a family video, a young girl blew out four candles on a birthday cake while her father stood by in the warm glow of a yellow kitchen.
Now the father is dead and half the kitchen is gone. A bowl of fruit still sits on the kitchen table amidst the rubble — a remnant of the Korenovskiy family’s life before a Russian cruise missile destroyed their riverside home in this eastern city.
The strike reduced much of their nine-story apartment block in Dnipro to rubble in one of the deadliest single attacks on civilians since Russia invaded Ukraine.
The father, Mykhailo Korenovskiy, was among 45 people killed in the strike, including six children, the youngest of whom was 11 months old.
Mr Korenovskiy, a boxing trainer, had just returned home from a tournament and was planning to join his wife Olha, who had gone out with their daughters at 3:30pm on Saturday before the strike, she said.
Dnipro was one of several Ukrainian cities that have recently been the target of Russian missile attacks. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Instead, his death and the half-ruined kitchen became a symbol of Russian cruelty. A photo of the aftermath and the undated earlier birthday video were widely shared online, sparking expressions of anger and determination in Ukraine and the West as the war nears the one-year mark.
“The latest symbol of Russian terror is a yellow kitchen,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday. “One day the room is full of happiness. The day after, the family is gone.”
The Kh-22 missile that hit the apartment block was fired from Russia’s Kursk region, said Ukraine’s Air Force commander, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshuk.
A rescue team was working amid the rubble of the damaged building on the day of the attack.
Photo: EPA/Shutterstock
A woman who survived the strike prayed at the site of the attack.
Photo: Mykola Synelnykov/Portal
However, the intended goal remains unclear. Ukrainian war crimes investigators and prosecutors inspected the scene of the strike over the weekend. There were no military targets near the building, said the attorney general’s office, which called the Kh-22 ship sinking missile “extremely inaccurate” and called its use in densely populated areas a war crime.
Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin briefed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the investigation and said only a Russian military unit could have launched the missile. “We are preparing a suspicious activity report for the head of this unit,” Mr. Kostin said on Tuesday.
Russian officials said the missile was aimed at a legitimate target but was shot down by Ukrainian air defense systems, causing it to slam into the apartment building.
The same type of missile, with a maximum range of just under 400 miles, was used by Russian forces in an attack on a shopping mall in the city of Kremenchuk last June, killing at least 20 people.
Rescue workers clear debris from the strike, one of the deadliest single attacks on civilians since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
Emergency services evacuate a woman at the scene of the attack.
Photo: CLODAGH KILCOYNE/Portal
Only more modern air defense systems such as the US Patriot systems are capable of intercepting the missiles, said Lieutenant General Oleschuk.
The US recently agreed to supply Kyiv with a Patriot missile defense system, but deployment will take several months. About 100 Ukrainian soldiers are to begin training at a US military base in Oklahoma, the Pentagon said last week.
“We remain committed to maintaining our security assistance to Ukraine as it defends its people against brutal Russian attacks like the one we saw just this weekend on a Dnipro apartment building far from the front lines,” Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said said Wednesday.
With a 950-kilogram warhead, the Kh-22 is designed to destroy aircraft carrier groups at sea, Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said. Russia has about 100 left over, he said, some provided by Ukraine as payment for pre-war gas debts. “Their fate is that they are now returning to Ukraine,” said Mr. Ihnat.
Rescue workers pulled 39 people from the rubble of the block of flats, including six children, said Deputy Head of the President’s Office Kyrylo Tymoshenko. Including Kateryna Zelenska, who was born deaf. According to her sister, she could not hear when rescue workers told survivors to shout so they could be found. Photos showed rescuers carrying Ms. Zelenska to the ground with a neck brace. Both her husband and their young son were killed.
Volunteers distribute food and other items to people who have lost their homes in Dnipro, Ukraine.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Of the 28 people hospitalized, 10 are in critical condition, Tymoshenko said. A surgeon at a local hospital said some had traumatic brain injuries.
Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov said rescue workers checked the roofs of surrounding buildings in case bodies were hurled there by the blast. Debris is being searched for human remains, but it’s possible that no trace of some victims will ever be found.
Three children were orphaned, including siblings from the city of Nikopol, whose parents had moved to Dnipro believing it would be safer there, said Natalia Babachenko, adviser to the head of the Dnepropetrovsk regional military administration. The remains of 12 people have yet to be identified and 17 people are still missing, she added.
Search and rescue operations were called off Tuesday after 69 hours.
Locals came to lay flowers near the site on Wednesday as a bulldozer cleared away debris and glass. Vladyslava Pedan, 18, stood with tears streaming down her cheeks next to a makeshift memorial some 50 meters from the destroyed building. Her classmate Maksym Bohutskiy was home alone in his seventh-floor apartment when the Russian missile struck. The 17-year-old student was killed.
Ms. Pedan, who will become a translator into English and German, lives just over a mile away with her parents and younger sister. “When I saw the news, something broke inside me,” she said.
The coffin of Mykhailo Korenovskiy, a Ukrainian boxing trainer and father of two, on the day of his funeral in Dnipro, Ukraine.
Photo: CLODAGH KILCOYNE/Portal
A relative mourns during the funeral of Mr Korenovskiy, who was killed during the Russian missile attack.
Photo: vitalii matokha/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Before the strike, Anastasia Shvets was mourning the death of her partner, killed at the front in the war with Russia in September. Now she also mourns her father and mother. They had made candles together in the kitchen for Ukrainian forces, but Ms Schwez went to her room and went to bed before her evening shift, she told a Ukrainian TV station.
The next moment a door was slammed shut for her. When she regained her senses, she could see the entrance to someone else’s house. She was photographed clutching a stuffed animal, her face twisted in horror as she waited in the ruins for rescuers to trip her.
“I have nothing to say,” she later wrote in a post on Instagram alongside posts showing her at a graduation ceremony and in a pool. “I feel nothing but a great emptiness inside me.”
Flowers commemorating the victims of the strike in the Dnipro apartment building.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
—Matthew Luxmoore contributed to this article.
Write to Isabel Coles at [email protected]
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