CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — It was Yulia Hrebnyeva’s fastidiousness that saved her family’s life.
First, she sent her husband out to fix the lock on the door of their house. Then she took her children to the basement and insisted that they help her clean up the room where they had slept every night to avoid the Russian missile attacks.
And then a Russian Su-34 fighter plane crashed through the roof of their two-storey house.
A few blocks away, Vitaliy Serhienko was not so lucky. The pilot of the crashed Russian plane was ejected. Mr. Serhienko and his brother-in-law, Serhiy Tkachenko, heard footsteps on their roof and went to investigate. “We wanted to get him,” Mr. Tkachenko said.
The two men were approaching the source of the noise from opposite directions when Mr. Tkachenko heard gunshots. The pilot had shot Mr. Serhienko in the chest; he died in his own chicken coop.
Tragedy and serendipity are dishonored in wars, and on March 5, when a Russian plane fell from the sky, they produced two very different results in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine. One family lived, almost miraculously, while Mr. Serhienko died, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There was an additional element to the equation: the Russian pilot did not have a chance to drop his bombs.
“Had these bombs fallen on Chernihiv, there would have been so many more casualties,” Ms Hrebnyeva said, inspecting the wreckage that was still in her yard more than two months after the crash. “Our house held it back.”
Mr. Serhienko’s sister, Svitlana Voyteshenko, buried him the next day. “He was such a good man, he worked hard,” she said. “Everyone liked him.”
The crash claimed yet another life as flames spread to a house across Ms Hrebnyeva’s yard and an elderly, bedridden man was burned.
Chernihiv, located just 65 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, was quickly surrounded and besieged at the start of the war by Russian forces invading from both sides. The attacks were fierce. Russian forces deliberately bombed critical infrastructure such as water and electricity stations, as well as food storage, Cherhiniv City Council chief Oleksandr A. Lomako said in an interview, but never took full control of the city center.
Mr Lomako said prosecutors had recorded 350 deaths from rocket attacks, and he estimates another 700 were killed from causes related to the siege: lack of electricity, water and food.
Outrage over the destruction and death caused by Russia simmered among residents as the pilot catapulted out of the plane. Members of Chernihiv’s Territorial Defense, a volunteer army unit, heard the explosion, said a soldier, Ivan Lut. He ran to where he thought the pilot would land, saw the orange-and-white parachute hovering over the house, and started his own pursuit, he said.
The chase ended next to Mr. Tkachenko when the Russian pilot, named Major Aleksandr V. Krasnoyartsev in an intelligence investigation, was detained.
His face and chest were covered in blood. Flat on his back on the floor, he raised his arms and begged, “Don’t shoot, I surrender!” according to video footage taken with a Ukrainian soldier’s cell phone.
Soon a crowd gathered, some seeking revenge. “We had to fight our own men to save his life,” said Mr. Lut, pointing out that soldiers had been ordered to capture the pilot alive. The copilot was already dead when the soldiers found him.
The remains of the plane, a supersonic midrange bomber aircraft, are scattered around Ms Hrebnyeva’s yard. She pointed to the remains of a sauna and small swimming pool nearby. Tulips peeked out of the plane’s metal wreckage.
Mrs. Hrebnyeva was walking towards the burnt stump of a tree when she saw something among the rubble: a pair of small jeans belonging to her 6-year-old son, still neatly folded, although the drawer they once contained was unrecognizable. There was more: red shorts whose waistband was intact, but the back had burned through; a small swimsuit; the sportswear of her 10-year-old Denys.
“I almost want to take it home and wash and iron it,” she said. She’d come home that Saturday morning from a crew arranging supplies for the soldiers defending the city. She bought a lock at the hardware store across the street. Her husband, Rostyslav, was in the kitchen cooking dumplings for their three children and another child who was separated from her parents after Chernihiv was attacked on the first day of the war.
Ms. Hrebnyeva’s husband playfully cursed when she sent him out to install the new lock, she said. She took the kids to the basement to clean.
And then they heard a rumble. “The rocks just came down,” she said. “Everything started to shake.” She thought she heard shooting, she added, but it was the roof shingles that came loose.
Her husband, a retired military pilot, suffered burns to his hands and… face, but was able to get help to pull her and the four children out of the basement.
“If my husband had not opened the door, we would have been burned alive,” Ms Hrebnyeva said.
From a military point of view, the destruction of the plane was a sign of Ukraine’s success in deterring Russia from gaining air superiority. Before the large-scale invasion began, it was widely believed that Russia could subdue the Ukrainian air force and gain control of its airspace within days. But Ukraine was able to shoot down at least 25 Russian warplanes, according to the military analysis site Oryx. More than a third of these were destroyed over the course of a few days in early March, many by shoulder-fired portable surface-to-air missiles.
Russian pilots flew low to evade Ukrainian missile systems† said Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London.
The plane that crashed on March 5 was among about eight or nine others shot down in the span of a few days. That loss rate convinced Russian commanders that flying low during the day would be unsustainable, forcing pilots to fly at night, when darkness makes it much more difficult for Ukraine to use surface-to-air missiles effectively, Mr Bronk said.
During this flight, the Ukrainian army was able to shoot down the fighter plane before dropping all its weapons: Pictures of the same type of planes taking off the next day, published by the Russian Defense Ministry, showed it had carried at least eight 500-kilogram unguided bombs.
Mr Lut said the pilot told them that he had only received the targets for the missile strikes while in the air, and that he was unaware that they were reaching civilian targets.
Ms. Voyteshenko, whose brother was killed in the chicken coop, said the pilot looked her in the eye and told her he was unaware that civilians were living there.
Did she believe him? “Of course not,” she said.
Standing next to where her brother was murdered, Mrs. Voyteshenko looked at an apple tree planted by her parents. She and her brother had reaped the fruits together from childhood.
Her brother had started installing insulation and refurbishing the facade of their house last fall.
“Now I don’t know if we’ll be able to finish it,” she said.
Mrs. Hrebnyeva marveled at the events in the life of her family. “On March 5, I was handing out clothes and food to people,” she added. “On March 6, we had nothing. People started bringing it to us.”
She said she was determined to rebuild her house. Her husband is currently with the children in Norway.
“I want to stay. I really want to stay here and rebuild my house in this place just to bully the Ruscists,” she said, using a neologism for “Russian fascists” that has been rife in Ukraine since the invasion.
“I want to show everyone that war is war, but life goes on,” she added. “We Ukrainians are strong and unbreakable – unbeatable.”