Her daughter, Margarita, looked up at her. “When are we going to town to fetch Mum?” she asked. Me. Sorochan looked after the girl for her sister, who lives in another town that the family considered more dangerous.
The Sorochans, awakened by a siren and three explosions, rushed to the basement of the building. The daughter-in-law of their neighbor was killed, as well as the parents of one of Ms Sorochan’s friends. “We are afraid to stay here longer,” said her father, Viktor Sorochan.
Another couple, Vyacheslav and Iryna Odaynik, approached. Do you live here? “We used to live here,” he said. Odaynik said. They left for Moldova with their two children in March. But the kids were not happy and every now and then they returned for a weekend. “We were here a week ago and everything was peaceful,” he said.
Now they were back to determine the damage in their apartment on the seventh floor, but were not yet allowed. Mr Odaynik looked up.
Mr. Sorochan said, “Putin wants to capture Ukraine, everything.”
More than four months into the war, most Ukrainians seem to see no end to it, even if they express an iron-fisted belief that victory will be theirs. Families are scattered. Nowhere seems completely safe, not even a small summer resort in the southwestern corner of Ukraine, far from the exhaustion war in the Donbas. The Ukrainian weapons are insufficient for a broad counterattack, 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 call on our allies to expedite the delivery of much-needed weapons,” he said. Yenin, the deputy minister, said. “These are critical weeks of war.” He added that the Russian rockets had been “fired from the Black Sea”.