It was the cleverness of Yulia Harebneva that saved her family’s life.
First, she sent her husband out to lock the door of their house. Then she brought her children to the basement, insisting that they help clear the place where they were sleeping every night to avoid Russian missile attacks.
And then a Russian Su-34 fighter plane hit the roof of their two-storey house.
A few blocks away, Vitaly Serhienko was not so lucky. The pilot of the downed Russian plane was ejected. Serhienko and his brother-in-law, Serhi Tkachenko, heard footsteps on their roof, and went outside to check. “We wanted to catch him,” said Tkachenko.
Two men were approaching the source of the noise from opposite directions when Tkachenko heard gunshots. The pilot shot Serhienko in the chest; He died in his own chicken coop.
A Ukrainian soldier with a mobile phone shows a photograph of a Russian pilot captured in March in Chernihiv, Ukraine, on May 14, 2022. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)
Tragedy and gravity in the battle randomly dispersed, and on March 5, when a Russian plane fell from the sky, they hit Chernihiv, a city with two very different results. Ukrainethe answer is. One family almost miraculously lived, while Serhienko, in the wrong place at the wrong time, died.
There was one additional element to the equation: the Russian pilot didn’t have a chance to drop his bombs.
“If these bombs had fallen on Chernihiv, there would have been many more victims,” said Hrebeneva, surveying the debris in her yard more than two months after the accident. “Our house prevented it.”
Seriyenko’s sister Svitlana Voytshenko buried him the next day. “He was such a nice guy, he worked hard,” she said. “Everybody liked him.”
The accident claimed another life when flames spread to a house across the yard from Harebneva and an elderly, handicapped man died.
Chernihiv, located just 40 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, was quickly surrounded by Russian troops on both sides at the start of the war. The attacks were fierce. The head of the Cheriniv city council, Oleksandr A. Lomako, said the Russian military deliberately bombed critical infrastructure such as water and power stations, as well as food storage, but never gained full control of the city centre.
Svitlana Voytshenko on May 14, 2022, the day her family returns to see the wreckage of their home destroyed in the crash of a Russian warplane in Chernihiv, Ukraine. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)
Lomaco said prosecutors had recorded 350 people killed as a result of the missile attacks, and they estimated that 700 more were killed for reasons related to the siege: lack of electricity, water and food.
Outrage over the devastation and death caused by Russia was boiling among residents when the pilot ejected from the plane. Ivan Lut, a soldier, said that members of a Volunteer Army unit, the Territorial Defense of Chernihiv, heard the explosion. He said he saw an orange and white parachute hanging over the house where he thought the pilot might land and began his own chase.
The chase ended next to Tkachenko’s home when the Russian pilot, named in an intelligence investigation as Major Alexander Krasnoyartsev, was captured.
His face and chest were covered in blood. Flat on his back on the ground, he raised his arms, begging, “Don’t shoot, I surrender!” According to video footage shot on a Ukrainian soldier’s mobile phone.
Soon, a crowd gathered, looking for some revenge. “We had to fight with our own men to save his life,” Lut said, noting that the soldiers were ordered to capture the pilot alive. The co-pilot was already dead when the soldiers found him.
The remains of the plane, a supersonic midrange bomber plane, are scattered in Harebneva’s yard. He pointed to the remains of a nearby sauna and a small swimming pool. Tulips emerged from the metal wreckage of the plane.
Harebneva was walking near a burnt stump of a tree when she saw something among the rubble: a small pair of jeans from her 6-year-old son, still neatly folded, regardless of the drawer in which they were kept Yes, he was unrecognizable. There was more: a pair of red shorts with a waistband intact but burnt back; a short swimsuit; For the games of her 10-year-old, Denise.
Debris from the May 14, 2022 bombing in Chernihiv, Ukraine. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)
“I almost want to take it home and wash and iron it,” she said. She had come home that Saturday morning from a shift arranging supplies for the soldiers guarding the city. He bought a lock at the hardware store in the street. Her husband, Rostislav, was boiling dumplings in the kitchen for their three children and another child, who had been separated from their parents after the attack on Chernihiv on the first day of the war.
She said that when Yulia Harebneva’s husband sent her out to get a new lock, she cursed her. She took the kids to the basement to clean up.
And then they heard piece by piece. “The bricks were just falling down,” she said. “Everything started shaking.” He thought he heard shooting, he added, but it was the roof shingles coming undone.
Her husband, a retired military pilot, received burns on her hands and face, but she and four children were helped out of the basement.
“If my husband had not opened the door, we would have been burnt alive,” said Harebeneva.
From a military point of view, the destruction of the aircraft was a sign of Ukraine’s success in preventing Russia from gaining air superiority. Before the launch of a full-scale offensive, it was widely believed that Russia could subdue the Ukrainian Air Force and take control of the skies in a matter of days. But according to military analysis site Oryx, Ukraine has been successful in shooting down at least 25 Russian warplanes. More than a third of them were destroyed over several days in early March, many by shoulder-fired portable surface-to-air missiles.
Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London, said Russian pilots were flying low to avoid Ukraine’s missile systems.
The plane that crashed on 5 March killed about eight or nine other people over a period of several days. Bronk said that loss rate convinced Russian commanders that flying low during the day would be unsustainable, forcing pilots to fly at night, when darkness was the dominant source of surface-to-air missiles for Ukraine. Makes it difficult to use properly, Bronk said.
Ivan Lut, a Territorial Defense Volunteer, at the Veterans Section of the Cemetery in Chernihiv, Ukraine, May 14, 2022. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)
On this flight, the Ukrainian military was able to shoot down the warplane before dropping all its weapons: images of the same type of aircraft taking off the next day, published by the Russian Defense Ministry, showed that it was less was carrying at least eight. Unguided 500 kg bomb.
Lutt said that the pilot told him that he had only received targets for missile strikes while he was in the air, and was unaware that they were hitting civilian objectives.
Voytshenko, whose brother was killed in the chicken coop, said the pilot looked into his eyes and told him he did not know civilians were living there.
Did she believe him? “Not at all,” she said.
As she stood next to the place where her brother was killed, Voytshenko saw a Apple A tree planted by his parents. He and his brother had raised its fruit together since childhood.
Her brother started installing insulation and redoing the facade of their house last year.
“Now I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it done,” she said.