War in Ukraine: Residents of Irpin said some Russian tanks passed through last week.
Irpin, Ukraine:
Yevghen Sboromyrskiy’s body shook so violently that he could not put his cigarette to his lips when he saw his house burn to the ground after it had been shelled during a Russian attack.
The deafening blast on Kiev’s northwestern front forced Sboromyrskiy’s neighbors to hide behind their wooden fences, crouching at every bang.
But Sboromyrskiy, stunned, stood in the middle of the road and shook.
“I opened the fridge to get some eggs,” the 49-year-old said, crying. “Then a big bang, the fridge fell on top of me, and then the whole house did.”
His German Shepherd barked and ran in urgent circles in Sboromyrskiy’s padlocked backyard as his wooden house was on fire and fighting raged above him.
The smoke thickened and his neighbors shouted warnings about the explosion of the reserve tank of fuel in the shed.
Sboromyrskiy started running in his soot-covered T-shirt, then stopped and dropped to his knees.
“My whole life is over,” he sobbed. “My wife came out the window and thank God my kids went to the store 10 minutes early. Thank God that thing crashed into their room.”
He paused and wrapped his fingers around the back of his head.
“They could have been dead,” he said, and sobbed again.
Russian Tank Graveyard
The second week of the Russian attack on Ukraine has led to increasingly deadly and seemingly indiscriminate attacks on residential areas such as the one in the town of Irpin in Sboromyrskiy.
On a day of almost continuous Russian shelling, thick plumes of black smoke towered over parts of Kiev’s northwestern suburbs.
The locals are both scared and amazed.
It is unclear how the Russians plan to invade the city from this front, as Ukraine took the drastic step of blowing up the bridges along the western edge of Kiev to keep the invaders out.
Residents of Irpin said a number of Russian tanks rolled through the air on Thursday evening, blowing apart a storage facility used by US cosmetics producer Mary Kay.
“I don’t know what the tanks are doing because they can’t cross the river to Kiev,” said local security guard Vasyl Prikhodko.
“They shoot at things. Then they roll back. Maybe they’re just trying to scare us,” said the 47-year-old.
Bucha, the neighboring town of Irpin, has been turned into a graveyard for Russian armored vehicles that tried to penetrate Kiev last week.
An entire street of the abandoned and partially destroyed city is filled with the burnt-out remains of tanks and other armored vehicles marked with a distinct white “V” indicating their grouping in Russian strategy.
The same sign was seen last month on Russian military hardware involved in weeks of war games along the Ukrainian border in Belarus.
“I hope we all survive”
Three men knelt on the ground with their hands up as Ukrainian soldiers aimed their Kalashnikovs at their chests at the main checkpoint between Bucha and Irpin.
Ukrainian soldiers had scoured the forests and fields of the region in search of Russian saboteurs who might try to infiltrate the city in civilian clothes.
Some elderly people crouched by a low wall a few meters away to hide from the grenades and rockets that whistled overhead.
Their bodies were framed by the charred remains of a shattered house and a partially destroyed high-rise apartment in the distance.
Retired Viktor Pobedniy walked the dirt roads of the neighboring town of Stayanka and looked up at the burning sky and wondered when the foreign pledges of aid to Ukraine could become something that makes his life a little safer.
“They have imposed so many sanctions on Russia and nothing is working,” said the former naval officer.
“They have to say that if this war doesn’t end, NATO troops will invade to stabilize the situation in Ukraine. It can’t go on like this.”
Oksana Surinova took matters into her own hands.
The 52-year-old grabbed an assault rifle from the passenger seat of her car and aimed it out her window.
“I have to defend my homeland,” she said. “Everyone still here, we’re all going to stay until the end and I hope we all survive this.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
