SERHIIVKA, Ukraine — His forehead slashed from his rescue efforts in the rubble of a hotel in this sleepy southern resort town, Oleksandr Mararenko executed the bodies of a woman and child after a Russian rocket attack early Friday morning.
“I couldn’t even tell if the child was a boy or a girl because the body was so cut to pieces,” he said, pulling down a helmet to return to his dreary task.
The rockets, believed to have been fired from the Black Sea, tore through the Godji Hotel and an entire portion of a nine-storey apartment building, killing at least 21 people in one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since the war in Ukraine began. than four months. past. Rescuers searched the rubble for victims or, possibly, survivors many hours after the attack.
Yellow cranes lifted slabs of concrete from the twisted wreckage of the collapsed hotel; blankets and laundry clung to the side of an apartment building; a purple curtain, blown up by the shock waves, hung eerily from a pine tree. Maple leaves that had been shot from trees formed a huge green carpet amid the chaos and bloodshed.
Residents said they heard a siren followed by three explosions in quick succession. “I would bite them with my teeth, these barbarians,” said Nikolai Tyazhchenko, 71. He burst into tears as he stared at a pile of rubble.
Anger ran high over what many people called the “Russists” – a Russian and fascist elision popular among Ukrainians – in a city that had hitherto been largely protected from war.
There were no apparent military targets in the vicinity of the attack, about 50 miles (80 km) southwest of Odessa. It came a day after Russian troops left Snake Island, several dozen miles away in the Black Sea, following continued Ukrainian artillery bombardment.
Conquered by Russia in February, Snake Island has risen to prominence in the Ukrainian war effort since a Ukrainian soldier stationed on the strategic island used a powerful force word to tell a Russian warship approaching him that he got lost. The Ukrainian postal service has issued a stamp showing the soldier making an obscene gesture towards the Russian cruiser Moskva, which sank in April. The stamp has become a collector’s item.
“This was revenge for the successful liberation of Snake Island,” Yevhen Yenin, the first deputy interior minister, said in an interview. He scoffed at Russian claims that leaving the island was a “goodwill” gesture to show Moscow didn’t want to block shipping routes essential for Ukrainian grain exports.
“This was not good will, it was our precision strikes” on Snake Island, he said. However, there was no direct evidence that this city was the target of an act of Russian reprisals. Rather, the attack was of a similarly seemingly random targeting of residential areas.
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
President Vladimir V. Putin this week denied that Russia was responsible for indiscriminate attacks on Ukrainian civilians. “None of us shoot so randomly,” he said, insisting that Russia targeted Ukraine based on “intelligence data” and with “high-precision weapons.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov echoed Putin’s words on Friday, saying that Russian troops are “not working against civilian targets in the course of the special military operation” — the expression Russia uses for its invasion of, and war. in Ukraine.
However, from the start of the war, Russian forces have repeatedly shelled civilian targets – including apartment buildings, a train station, a theater used as a shelter, a shopping center and a maternity hospital – and have rendered some towns and villages uninhabitable.
The latest attack on the Russian offensive in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, the city of Lysykhansk, came Friday under the same heavy and indiscriminate shelling from civilian areas that flattened its sister city, Sievierodonetsk, during fighting last month.
“The occupiers are destroying house after house with heavy artillery and other weapons,” said Luhansk region governor Serhiy Haidai.
Speaking about what was left of the apartment complex in Serhiivka, Mr. Yenin said, “their aim is to scare the Ukrainian people and put an end to our resistance. But the effect is the opposite. We will never surrender. This is our country.” Alluding to Mr. Putin, he said, “Russian society has been poisoned by him.”
Oksana Sorochan, a seamstress, held her 5-year-old niece behind the residential building where her second-floor apartment was damaged: “I don’t understand much. All I understand is that they’re killing us, and that’s it.”
She sat with other survivors in a children’s playground where shattered glass lay between the swings and seesaws and slides. The concrete building, with its shattered windows and smashed satellite dishes dangling from it, loomed above them.
The soft summer sunlight and the shards of hot metal falling from the early morning sky seemed hard to reconcile. In fields opposite the building, fallen cherries and plums lay scattered across the rich soil.
“I don’t know why the Russians say they’re protecting us from something,” said Mrs. Sorochan. “Protect us by killing us?”
Her niece, Margarita, looked up at her. “When are we going to town to get Mama?” she asked. Mrs. Sorochan had taken care of the girl for her sister, who lives in another town that the family had considered more dangerous.
The Sorochans, awakened by a siren and three explosions, had rushed to the basement of the building. Their neighbor’s daughter-in-law was murdered, as were the parents of one of Mrs. Sorochan’s friends. “We are afraid to stay here any longer,” said her father, Viktor Sorochan.
Another couple, Vyacheslav and Iryna Odaynik, approached. Do you live here? “We used to live here,” Mr. Odaynik said. They had left for Moldova in March with their two children. But the kids weren’t happy and every now and then they came back for a weekend. “We were here a week ago and everything was peaceful,” he said.
Now they were back to assess the damage to their seventh-floor apartment, but they hadn’t been let in yet. Mr. Odaynik looked up at it.
Mr. Sorochan said: “Putin wants to conquer Ukraine, everything.”
More than four months into the war, most Ukrainians seem to see no end, even if they express a firm belief that the victory will be theirs. Families are scattered. Nowhere seems completely safe, not even in a small summer resort in the southwestern corner of Ukraine, far from the war of attrition in the Donbas. Ukraine’s weapons are insufficient for a wide-ranging counter-attack, although the expulsion of the Russians from Snake Island illustrates the depth of the country’s resistance.
“We need more support from the West, and we are urging our allies to accelerate deliveries of much-needed weapons,” said Mr. Yenin, the deputy minister. “These are critical weeks of the war.” He added that the Russian missiles were “fired from the Black Sea”.
A large piece of shrapnel had stuck in a tree not far from him, perilously balanced. Down the street, a researcher collected shards of shrapnel, measured them, and sorted them by size. It seemed arduous work, like that of the rescuers digging deeper into the collapsed hotel, not knowing what they would find.
Alla Beshentseva, 52, watched the rescue work under a tree. She has lived in the city for 33 years and works in a sanatorium. “I’m so stressed out,” she said. “I didn’t fully realize what happened.”
She seemed inconsolable. The unthinkable – death from a clear sky and for no reason – is now the daily reality of Ukraine.
Alan Yuhas contributed reporting from New York.
