The Russian army has resumed its strikes on Odessa, the major port city in southern Ukraine, on the Black Sea. On Monday, a shot damaged a building in which five people were. A 15-year-old boy died, another minor child was taken to hospital. Ukrainians fear that the city will be one of Russia’s next targets. In recent days, the attacks have intensified. On April 23, strikes that hit a residential building in particular killed at least eight people. Back to the scene of this tragedy.
With our special correspondents Odessa, Anastasia Becchio and Boris Vichith
Workers throw rubble and scrap metal from the first five floors of the gutted building. At the foot of the building, under a marquee, Konstantin Anissimov takes stock with contractors, who offer to cover the costs of reconstruction work. This architect, professor of the Building Academy, who mobilized several dozen of his students on this site, still cannot explain how the building did not collapse.
This central part should have yielded at the moment of impact, but it held. It is undoubtedly God, who had his hands above us. There are things that cannot be rationally explained. That’s all philosophy, but also luckily the missile didn’t explode here, it continued on its trajectory. If the 400 kg of explosives had gone off here, the whole neighborhood would have been flattened.
The explosion claimed the lives of eight people, including an infant. Marina Kravchenko, owner of an aerial gymnastics studio, was rehearsing at the time of the attack.
We stayed alive by a happy combination of circumstances. If it had fallen a little bit lower, our studio would no longer exist and neither would we, for that matter. When we came out there was a lot of smoke, everything was black and you couldn’t see the damage. It was only later that I saw videos and then I was even more scared.
If before, Marina ignored the sirens, now she immediately runs to hide in the basement at the slightest alarm.
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