“The children were having their breakfast at the time of the explosion. Natalia Slessareva, an employee of the kindergarten in Stanitsa Luganska, hit Thursday by a bombardment in eastern Ukraine, is still in shock.
One of the walls of the establishment’s sports hall was pierced by a shell. In the middle of children’s toys, bricks are strewn across the room with colorful wallpaper.
“The explosion sounded around 9 a.m. I was in the laundromat. I was thrown by the shock wave towards the door. I no longer felt the right side of my head, everything was ringing, ”says Mme Slessareva, 54 years old. Twenty children were then in the canteen and then had to go down to the gym. “If the explosion had occurred 15 minutes later, the consequences could have been catastrophic,” she adds.
The 18 adults who were there at the time of the explosion, however, managed to evacuate them. The establishment usually accommodates 57 children. This time the majority had stayed home due to anti-COVID restrictions.
Stanitsa Luganska, a small town on the eastern front line of Ukraine, was hit by intense shelling on Thursday, provoking indignant reactions from Western leaders while separatists denounced manipulation by Kiev. According to the Ukrainian army, 32 shells fell on the city, partially depriving it of electricity.
Three school employees were injured. Another shell fell on the play area, where a funnel-shaped crater is visible between the two slides.
Broken windows, no power
Alerted by the school, Natalia, 38, ran to pick up her two-year-old son. “We rushed, with my husband, by car to pick up the child,” says this resident who did not give her last name. “I was very scared, there is no bomb shelter in this kindergarten, just thick walls. We can see that they have been damaged. I can’t calm down,” she continues.
Thursday afternoon, a few hours after the bombardment, part of the shops and gas stations in the city were still closed for lack of electricity. Residents covered their windows with plastic bags, the windows of many homes having been blown out by the explosions.
“It was quiet before New Years, but now they’ve started to pull harder,” observes a man picking up shards of glass from his balcony on the second floor of a small building.
Since 2014, a war between Ukrainian forces and separatist fighters, militarily supported by Moscow according to Kiev and the West, has bloodied eastern Ukraine. Despite numerous ceasefire attempts, some relatively respected, the fighting never completely ceased and left more than 14,000 dead.
Since November, Moscow has massed more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s eastern borders, raising fears of a military operation against Kiev and a resumption of full-scale fighting in the area.
President Zelensky denounced Thursday’s shooting at Stanitsa Luganska as a “provocation”, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused Moscow of wanting to use the event to “discredit” Kiev and justify intervention. The Lugansk separatists, on the other hand, accused Kiev of having multiplied the bombardments with heavy weapons to “push the conflict towards an escalation”.
On the ground, the shells that fell Thursday recalled the worst hours of a conflict that has never ceased. “It’s a tragedy, but fortunately there were no victims,” comments Natalia Slessareva. “Me, I have only one wish, that the war ends. »