"We carried water and fought the flames ourselves": Kyiv residents describe overnight strike on capital – photos

Russian forces attacked Kyiv on the night of 28-29 November, killing two people and leaving 19 in hospital.
Patrol police have released bodycam footage of officers who rescued a young boy from under the rubble of a residential building.
Quote from Oleksii Biloshytskyi, First Deputy Head of the Patrol Police Department: "The inspectors heard a child crying under the rubble, quickly cleared a way through and pulled the boy out. They then rushed him to an ambulance and handed him over to medics."
Details: Residential buildings in many districts of the capital have also been damaged.
Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia (Life) has gathered first-hand testimonies from Kyiv residents who have lived through the strike.
High-rise buildings in the Solomianskyi district have been hit in the attack. Debris from one drone has partially destroyed the façade of a 25-storey residential building and wreckage from another fell on the roof of a 17-storey block. A garage in a small residential area caught fire.
Mariia, who lives in the residential complex where several apartments have been damaged, said the strike happened at about one in the morning. She and her husband escaped injury, but the blast wave blew out the windows and doors in their apartment and tore away the balcony.
"It was stressful and unexpected," she told Suspilne.Kyiv, a local branch of Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne. "I was in the hallway. We could hear Shahed [drones], as they were flying towards us, closer and closer. We ran to the front door, we did not have time to open it before the strike came."
Another resident, whose apartment has been damaged, admitted that her home has suffered relatively less damage than others in the complex.
"First there was a deafening explosion, the windows in our bedrooms were blown out," she said. "We looked out and saw a huge fire. When we went outside, we saw that all the windows were smashed and shards of glass were lying on the ground."
In the Sviatoshynskyi district, a person was killed when Russian forces struck a residential building. Neighbours of the deceased said the impact came at about two in the morning.
"I heard people shouting and then the smoke came," Oleksandr Vasylenko, a Kyiv man, said. "Before firefighters arrived, we were filling buckets with water and putting out the flames ourselves because the fire was spreading badly. The emergency workers arrived and put everything out. Everything in my place is flooded now."
Nearby buildings have also been damaged.
"I looked out of the window and saw an apartment on fire in the neighbouring building," said Alla Tsyhanok, who lives in one of the damaged blocks. "We ran outside, and the guys rushed to save people. They carried out a woman, she was unconscious".
UNICEF Ukraine has said that overnight, a Russian drone hit a residential complex where 13-year-old schoolboy Denys lives.
On the morning of 29 November, he was meant to go to his piano lesson, but instead he stood with his mother on shattered glass outside their building, calling relatives to see if they were safe after the strike.
The boy said he no longer recognises the buildings near his home after the attack.
"I feel very sad seeing everything destroyed because I love this neighbourhood," he added.
Denys noted that he and his family have been going down to a shelter whenever large-scale attacks occur, ever since the full-scale invasion began. They sleep in their car in the underground car park. Although he feels tired afterwards, Denys says being in a shelter gives him a sense of safety.
"Now, when I go to bed in the evening, I understand that during the night we will either have to rush to the shelter very quickly or things could end very badly. So we do not ignore air-raid warnings," he added.
Another Kyiv resident told Kyiv24 TV channel that the strike caught him by surprise while he was driving. He heard two explosions, with the force of the second spinning his car around and starting a fire nearby.
The blast blew out the windows in his vehicle and left dents on all sides. He suffered burns and shrapnel wounds but says he is already feeling better.
Volunteers from Kyiv Animal Rescue Group have provided assistance to those affected by the attack. In the Sviatoshynskyi district, activists joined search efforts and rescued a cat, while in the Solomianskyi district they found a bird in the burnt-out ruins of a building.
In the Dniprovskyi district, the volunteers helped evacuate a woman with three dogs, a cat, and a pet rat. In the village of Tarasivka near Kyiv, they assisted in putting out a fire that had engulfed a house.
Background:
- On the night of 28-29 November and on the morning of 29 November, Russian forces launched a combined strike on Ukraine. The Russians used about 36 missiles and almost 600 drones. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Russia's main targets were energy infrastructure and civilian facilities.
- Two people have been killed and 29 injured in Russia's strike on Kyiv overnight. In the Ukrainian capital, residential blocks and houses in several districts have been damaged in the strike.
- Half a million Kyiv residents have been left without power as a result of the attacks. Electricity supply has later been restored for some consumers.
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