‘Couldn’t see anything’: Kyiv locals escape burning building hit by Russian drone

KYIV - Russia launched a massive missile and drone strike on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv overnight, just as negotiators tried to hammer out a possible proposal to end the nearly four-year war.

The strikes killed seven people, heavily damaged apartment buildings and forced locals to shelter for hours in their bathrooms, basements and at metro stations.

Two women told AFP how they were woken by the explosions and had to escape their seventh-floor apartments as smoke poured in from a fire engulfing the upper parts of the building.

‘Thick, acrid smoke’

Ms Iryna Kukurik said she didn’t have time to go the shelter, like she normally does when there is a massive Russian attack.

“When the alert started, we saw that a lot of things were flying, so much that we were afraid to go outside,” she told AFP, eyes tearful.

A Russian drone crashed into the seventh-floor apartment opposite hers in a building on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the early hours of Nov 25.

“Within a minute, we couldn’t go out. A very thick, acrid smoke started seeping through the door,” she said.

“We tried to suppress it with wet clothes, anything we could grab.”

“We thought about going out, made some masks for ourselves. But even opening the door a minimal amount, the smoke came in so quickly,” she said.

“Within a few minutes, the apartment was filled with so much smoke. We couldn’t understand what was happening, where to go. We couldn’t see anything.”

She rushed to the balcony to try to get some fresh air.

The apartment opposite them was on fire.

“We stayed on the balcony for half an hour, and then we were evacuated in masks.”

Ms Kukurik and her husband, who was in the apartment with her, survived with minor burns to their respiratory systems.

Others were not so lucky.

The Kyiv prosecutor’s office said two people were killed in the building after a fire broke out between the seventh and ninth floors.

Ms Kukurik does not know the fate of her neighbours from the apartment that was hit.

“Around us, it’s just a nightmare,” she said, surveying the damage.

The top floors of the building were charred black. Rescuers were scooping debris out of the open facade through the morning, into a courtyard below with a children’s play area in front of emergency vehicles.

All the clothes she managed to grab from the apartment are either wet or damaged.

Temperatures were barely above freezing when she was evacuated onto the street in the middle of the night.

Some 40 minutes after she was saved, rescuers brought her a piece of good news: they had managed to retrieve her pet parrot.

But “the apartment is no longer livable because of the smoke and the fire”, she said.

‘Balcony gone’

Ms Alla Gorbacheva also lived on the seventh floor of the building. She was woken at 2.20am with a “loud, brief bang.”

“We screamed, jumped up. I ran to the window to look... I saw below, in patches, burning, smoking, something smouldering,” she told AFP.

She ran frantically around her small apartment, checking room to room.

“All the windows were blown out, and the balcony was gone,” Ms Gorbacheva said.

As smoke poured into the apartment, she gathered some essentials and tried to leave.

Wires were hanging from the ceiling through the corridor, obstructing the exit.

“Men shouted, ‘Duck down, duck down’,” Ms Gorbacheva, in a blue coat, black furry hat and with bright pink manicured nails, told AFP.

She did not give her age, but appeared to be in her sixties or seventies.

“The smoke was very thick and there was a lot of it, it was just unbearable. Well, thank God, a man and a young guy helped us get downstairs,” she said.

She was waiting to be let back into her apartment to survey the damage.

“We just don’t know what will happen next.” AFP