About a minute after the sirens went off on Saturday morning, Yulia Klepets heard a huge bang. She saw from her window that an apartment building about 200 meters from her house was hit by something.
There was a huge hole on one side of the high-rise. There was fire and smoke. Debris flew around. She panicked; her whole body was shaking.
Klepets squats in her house with her mother, two daughters and a cousin. The five women had to decide quickly. Klepets’ cousin and youngest daughter went to an underground parking garage that turned into a bomb shelter. She was left with her mother and eldest daughter.
“My mother is 82 years old. She can’t walk alone and there’s no way to get her down because we’re on the seventh floor,” she told DailyExpertNews on Saturday.
Klepets’ oldest daughter, Aryna, is 25 years old and has autism. She was in a state of shock, unable to move.
‘She couldn’t go down the stairs. She couldn’t stay in the shelter,’ Klepets said.
Aryna doesn’t understand what’s going on, Klepets said. She keeps asking her mother if there will be any more shaking.
“She wants to go to the sea, or at least to the pool, and I have to explain to her that there is war now, so we can’t do that, and then she says, ‘Maybe it’ll stop and then we’ll go to a nice place [near] the sea,” said Klepets, adding that Aryna can’t swim, but she really likes the coast. “She thinks [it] wonderful when she is by the sea.”
Not long after the strike, Klepets’ cousin came back from the basement. She said that Sofia, Klepets’ youngest daughter, was too scared without her. She tried to resist and refused to leave her mother and Aryna, but was forced to go.
“We have said goodbye. We hugged without saying a word,” she said.
Klepets said she has been trying to get help for her mother and Aryna for the past four days.
“I called the rehabilitation center and was told that people who were unable to move on their own should call and register so that they are on the list of people who need help with mobility,” she said. “They told me to call the next day and tell me what documents we needed. Then they told me they could come to my apartment to help me clean but they didn’t offer to take my daughter out. I don’t know what to say about this,” she said.
Klepets said families of people with disabilities are getting stuck in Kiev.
“There were evacuations yesterday, so there was a chance to get away. There were trains, the local transport was free, the trains were free, but you just had to come to the station and I can’t leave my mother,” she said.