Borodyanka, Ukraine – Days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a 500-kilogramme high-explosive bomb dropped from a fighter jet collapsed a section of Mariya Vasylenko’s apartment building.
During the March 1, 2022, attack that levelled or damaged dozens more houses in this once-tranquil town, 40 kilometres (25 miles) northwest of Kyiv, Vasylenko and her neighbours were hiding in an ice-cold basement.
They rushed outside to see how the heatwave turned the air blue, melted snow and ignited cars, leafless trees and frozen blades of grass around the building.
“Have you ever seen hell? That’s what it was,” Vasylenko, 80, told Al Jazeera.
Disoriented and deafened, she could not find her daughter Olena, a 41-year-old nurse, and her son-in-law Serhiy Khukhro, a 37-year-old construction worker, who were hiding in the basement under the collapsed section.
Their crushed bodies remained in the flooded basement while Vasylenko was evacuated to central Ukraine with their young children, Milena and Bohdan.
Meanwhile, Russian soldiers moved into Vasylenko’s apartment for a month, leaving rubbish, excrement and graffiti with Soviet symbols, and plundering all valuables when Moscow ordered a retreat from around Kyiv and northern Ukraine.
‘She doesn’t smile any more’
Weeks later, Vasylenko returned to Borodyanka to bury what was left of Olena and Serhiy.
Her grandchildren were sent to safety in Poland. She could not bear to tell Milena about her parents’ deaths for more than a year until they returned to Ukraine.
Milena is 12 now. She returned to Borodyanka with Vasylenko – and is deeply traumatised.
“She doesn’t smile any more,” Vasylenko said, sitting on a bench next to a community centre where she and her neighbour sing in an amateur choir.
“She can’t bear to see parents hugging and kissing her classmates after school because her mum and dad never will,” the 79-year-old neighbour, Hanna Ryashchenko, told Al Jazeera.
Both women and their relatives live in tiny rooms in a dormitory donated by Poland with communal bathrooms and kitchens.
Excavators started removing the debris from around Vasylenko’s building only two weeks ago.
From hell to limbo
At least 300 civilians were killed in Borodyanka, according to survivors, Ukrainian officials and human rights groups.
Russian forces bombed Borodyanka even though it never hosted a military base or plants producing weaponry.
Amnesty International, a rights monitor, concluded that the bombings “were both disproportionate and indiscriminate under international humanitarian law, and as such constitute war crimes”.
Russian soldiers operating tanks and artillery shelled apartment buildings point blank.
They also shelled shops and malls just to crack their doors or walls open and loot what was inside. The soldiers shot at anyone they saw without warning – and threatened to gun down those who tried to retrieve bodies from the streets or rescue survivors from under collapsed buildings, residents said.
For its part, Moscow has continually denied targeting civilians.
“I preferred to remain at home and starve,” Volodymyr Robovyk, a 69-year-old retired factory worker, told Al Jazeera.
Most of the trapped civilians, including children, were buried alive as they froze to death or starved.
Only one woman managed to save a family of eight by sneaking food and water into a tiny crevice at night.
Fifty-five apartment buildings, hundreds of houses, shops and offices have been destroyed or damaged, rendering thousands homeless and jobless, officials said.
A slow restoration
A dozen apartment buildings have been fully restored or retrofitted with heat-saving padding, plastic doors and windows, residents say.
But many more remain untouched.
“They dug this hole and are doing nothing,” Robovyk said, pointing at a construction pit on the Tsentralnaya (Central) street once named after Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.
Behind the fence was a brand new excavator that tumbled into the pit and lay upside down.
Robovyk’s tiny, shell-damaged house was patched up by volunteers in the autumn of 2022, but the renovation of larger buildings is far from over.
“The end of reconstruction is December 2024,” a plastic sign on the side of Valentyna Illyshenko’s five-storey apartment building reads.
But the house is still encapsulated in scaffolding as workers finish covering it with heat-saving plastic that also hides bullet and shrapnel holes.
Illyshenko fled her apartment with her husband and their six-year-old son on February 28, 2022, when Russian tanks and armoured vehicles entered Borodyanka or roared by on their way to Kyiv.
She said Russian soldiers occupied their apartment – and drank all the alcohol, destroyed every family photo and stole each electronic device.
At least one of the unwanted guests was a sniper who nestled in the kitchen and cut a hole in the drapes, she said.
The soldiers left the refrigerator and the washing machine only because they were too heavy to be carried down from the fourth floor, she said.
All heavy household appliances have been taken out of apartments on lower floors, and the Russians left Borodyanka with trucks loaded with stolen goods, Illyshenko and other locals said.
“Hatred is what I still feel,” she told Al Jazeera. “I could choke them with my own hands.”
Having escaped the occupation’s hell, she lives in a reconstruction limbo with the noise, the dust and the dirt.
Turf wars
Her explanation as to why the renovation progresses so slowly is simple – she blames Ukraine’s endemic corruption and the dismissal of Oleksander Sakharuk, a community head elected in 2020.
“They don’t let him work,” Illyshenko said.
Sakharuk was a member of the Platform for Life, a pro-Moscow party that was banned in 2022 and whose members were barred from holding elected jobs.
Even though many Platform for Life members in Russia-occupied areas began collaborating with Moscow, some remained staunchly pro-Ukrainian – including Sakharuk, several Borodyanka residents told Al Jazeera.
He got his job back in June 2023 and last October after court rulings, but both times the justice ministry overturned the decisions.
“When he’s back to work, things are moving. When they fire him again, things stop,” Vitalii Sydorenko, a 47-year-old war veteran, told Al Jazeera.
Sakharuk did not respond to requests for comment.
Ukraine’s ubiquitous corruption scandals have also delayed Borodyanka’s renovation.
Last December, anti-monopoly officials cancelled a contract to restore the apartment building where Vasylenko’s daughter and son-in-law died because of the construction company’s alleged corruption ties.
Vasylenko also spent several months and hundreds of dollars to restore the deed on her apartment and other documents destroyed by the bombing.
“I’m hoping to move back, but I’m too old to wait for years,” she said.
