Ukrainians Wait in Pain as Hope to Find Strike Survivors Fades
Kim Barker and
Reporting from Ternopil, Ukraine; The New York Times, Nov 22
article contains videos and additional photographs
His great-grandmother had always been there for him. When Ihor Cherepanskyi was a child and needed a hug, or wanted dumplings with sour cream made in the kitchen of her sixth-floor apartment. When he was 25, and his mother died of cancer. Whenever.
So on Wednesday morning, when Russian missiles hit their city in western Ukraine, Mr. Cherepanskyi, 37, rushed to her buillding, his lifelong refuge. It was on fire, heavy black smoke billowing from the top, so much so that he could not see the extent of the damage. He ran up the stairs, but the stairs above the fifth floor were destroyed. So he called her. He heard a phone ringing somewhere above him.
Valentyna Shablysta — an 86-year-old woman who always had a red manicure and her makeup just so — did not answer.
“I realized the chances were very small,” Mr. Cherepanskyi said just before 1 p.m. on Friday, standing in front of what remained of his great-grandmother’s building. “I understood the weight of the building, the power of the missile — all of it.”
Still, he waited.
As of Friday afternoon, the attack had killed 31 people in two nine-story apartment buildings in Ternopil, a city of about 225,000 far from the front lines that had been spared from major strikes like those on the capital, Kyiv, and on eastern Ukraine.
Six of the dead in Ternopil were children. As of Friday afternoon, 10 people, including Ms. Shablysta, were still missing.
Russia also hit a local factory in the attack, which came before 7 a.m., but no one was injured there. The strike was one of the worst on civilians in Ukraine — and the deadliest in the country’s west — since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Moscow, saying it targets only military and energy facilities, said the attack was in retaliation for “terrorist attacks” carried out by Ukraine in Russia using U.S.-supplied long-range ballistic missiles.
To residents of Ternopil, the attack felt doubly painful, coming the same week that the United States presented a peace plan that would hand President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia some of his major goals — more territory, a weaker Ukrainian military and no chance for Ukraine to join NATO.
The Trump administration wants Ukraine’s answer to the proposal by next week. Ukraine has refused such offers before. Mr. Cherepanskyi called it “disgusting.”
Since the missiles hit, Mr. Cherepanskyi has waited outside his great-grandmother’s building, arriving first thing each morning and going home just before curfew at midnight.
He has gone twice to the morgue to look at two bodies, but neither was Ms. Shablysta. One of the bodies had gray hair. Ms. Shablysta would never tolerate gray hair, he said. She always dyed hers a light blond.
Mr. Cherepanskyi has stood outside in temperatures that dipped five degrees below freezing. Wearing no gloves, a light jacket and a thin gray hat, he has watched rescue crews dig closer and closer to his great-grandmother’s apartment. He recognized her refrigerator, crumpled in the rubble on the fifth floor. He saw the crane pull out the section of stairs that were destroyed.
About 180 emergency responders worked in shifts to try to dig out survivors. They rescued a young man who had been in his kitchen on the ninth floor and somehow survived. They found a parrot, still in its cage, along with two cats. Those animals were alive. But the young man was the only human survivor.
A mother and daughter were found in an embrace, recognized only by the pendant on the woman’s neck, military officials said. Her daughter had just turned 8.
Taras Hnatiuk, 18, initially survived, but he ran back inside several times to rescue people, according to friends of his at the scene. His body, found heavily burned, was recognized by a tattoo on his right forearm. “I love my mom,” it said.
Mr. Hnatiuk had moved with his mother to Poland after the Russian invasion. He was visiting his grandmother for 10 days in Ternopil.
“We kept hoping until the end that he was somewhere on the lower floors, alive, or maybe he had gotten out somehow,” said Sofiia Larina, 16, a friend who came on Friday to leave flowers and cry. “But then we saw his apartment — it was right in the middle — and the apartment simply wasn’t there anymore.”
On Friday morning, three more bodies — two children and a woman — were pulled from the rubble.
The crowd of people waiting grew larger as the day grew longer. They created a makeshift memorial of candles, colorful lanterns, stuffed bunnies and bears, red carnations, purple chrysanthemums and two heart balloons in blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine’s flag.
Olha Hubitska, 66, came looking for her cousin, who she said was more like a sister. The family lived on the ninth floor; her cousin, her cousin’s daughter and her cousin’s granddaughter, Sofia, 4, were still missing. Ms. Hubitska pinballed between the apartment building and the hospital, where Sofia’s brother, Maksym, 10, was still recovering.
She said Maksym had told the family that he remembered a boom and that he had seen his grandmother — Ms. Hubitska’s cousin — on the floor with her eyes closed.
“He told us, ‘I don’t know how I ended up on the seventh floor — maybe the wind, or a wave, I don’t know,’” Ms. Hubitska recalled.
She waited into the evening, when spotlights lit up the jagged ruins and the building’s blue, white and red tiles so the workers could keep going. Most of the 53 apartments in this building had been passed from generation to generation since being handed out under the Soviet Union.
Mr. Cherepanskyi’s great-grandmother, Ms. Shablysta, got her apartment in 1982 and decorated it with fancy green wallpaper with gold designs, he said.
Ms. Shablysta, a former teacher and former director at the nearby Children’s Creativity Center, liked to cook. She loved Murchyk (“the one who purrs”), her white cat speckled with gray that she walked on a leash in the playground, Mr. Cherepanskyi said. She lived in the apartment with her husband until he died in 2018.
The season’s first snow started to fall as Mr. Cherepanskyi waited on Friday. At 9:18 p.m., a crane pulled a red cart used to remove dead bodies up to the emergency workers who were digging near his great-grandmother’s refrigerator. He saw them move a dead cat to the side. A black body bag was eventually placed inside the cart.
Mr. Cherepanskyi waited on the ground, suspecting it was his great-grandmother.
But it wasn’t. The authorities have yet to identify who it was.
A family album lying on the ground outside the residential building in Ternopil.
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.
Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine
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Polish Railway Sabotage: Poland accused two Ukrainians of working with Russia to sabotage train tracks, implicating Moscow in an attack that damaged a crucial supply line from NATO countries to Ukraine.
French Jets: France has pledged to sell up to 100 fighter jets to Ukraine in a show of European support as the Trump administration has limited its military backing for the country.
Ukraine’s Cash Running Low: The European Union wants to finance Ukraine’s war efforts using a loan based on Russia’s frozen assets in Belgium. If that falls through, there’s no easy alternative.
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