A Russian missile, sudden death and indescribable pain

KHERSON, Ukraine – Explosions were heard in the center of the city of Kherson, recently liberated from Russian occupation.

A quick check with a Ukrainian first response team confirmed that it was a Russian missile attack and that it had targeted a small settlement of little or no strategic value on the banks of the broad Dnieper River.

Many of the daily reports of the Ukrainian war are dull and monotonous.

A city or town is hit by shells or missiles, a body count of the dead and wounded is made, usually accompanied by a commentary from a local official.

The world shrugs it off and moves on, often unaware of the dire impact on families and lives.

The reality – the randomness of death, violence and often life-changing suffering at a terrible time – is often overlooked in these attacks.

That day, Russia fired half a dozen rockets at the settlement, which is part of the city of Kherson.

Soon after, residents ran around, sometimes on the run, looking for victims, helping the injured, and putting out fires.

It seemed that the whole world was in motion.

It was quickly learned that one person had died:

Dmytro Dudnyk, whose body lay in the doorway of the house of his mother-in-law, Svitlana Zubova.

Dudnyk had just brought her a bar of chocolate to share after-lunch tea when rockets hit the neighborhood.

One of them exploded in his garden, knocking Dudnyk unconscious and eventually killing him.

As neighbors ran with buckets of water to put out the flames in two nearby houses, she lay in a pool of blood on the floor of her home.

Dudnyk, 38, worked as a seaman on a freighter, but his contract was suspended due to the war.

Two weeks earlier, he had sent his wife and two daughters, aged 8 and 13, to live with their parents in the nearby town of Mykolaiv, as security around Kherson deteriorated following the withdrawal of Russian troops, who began firing missiles and artillery shells in the area across the river.

But he had insisted on staying in Kherson for take care of dogs and chickens of his house, next to that of his mother-in-law.

Explosions shook the morning air with shocking rapidity.

“His last words were, ‘Mom, here’s a chocolate for you,'” Zubova said.

“It popped out and exploded before I even put the potatoes in the pan.”

Two houses were burning in the street when firefighters and ambulances arrived.

A homeowner, who gave only his first name, Pavlo, was trying to fix his bucket of water as flames licked a hole in the roof.

Neighbors rushed to their homes with buckets of water, while others helped families rescue loved ones from damaged homes.

Down the street, Anatoliy Anatoliyovych, 83, leaned against his neighbor’s fence as flames engulfed his home.

He’s blind, he told a firefighter, and he didn’t know where his wife was.

She had gone to the store shortly before the bombing, she said.

Firefighters sprayed his house with water until the tank ran out.

They asked a resident if there was a water supply on the street.

There was a connection but no running water, he said.

The city of Kherson is largely without electricity and running water as the Russians destroyed much of its utilities in their retreat.

A second truck came to the rescue, but the house had already been destroyed.

In another badly damaged house, paramedics took an 85-year-old bedridden woman, Lyudmila, to a neighbor’s house across the street.

Lyudmila was given the neighbor’s daughter’s room, while her family began photographing the damage to their home, they said, for insurance.

Back at Zubova’s home, Dudnyk’s wife and parents arrived from Mykolaiv, some 100 kilometers away, screaming and crying as they ran towards her body, which still lay in the doorway.

His wife wept beside him as his dog whirled at his feet.

“Why? Why you?” cried his mother, Iryna.

Ambulance personnel had refused to take him away, telling the family that they should call the morgue service.

“I was asking him to leave,” said his father, Viktor, “this morning too. He was saying, ‘I don’t want to leave the house, the dogs, the chickens.’ But who needs all of that now?”

The police arrived to register the death. Zubova called the numbers the police gave her for the body collectors, but the first number didn’t work and the person who answered the second said she couldn’t travel to Kherson.

Then his cell phone went out of balance.

Eventually, a team showed up to remove Dudnyk’s body.

Zubova was pacing the courtyard, pushing away the remains of the bomb.

“I don’t know what to do now,” he said, “how to continue living.”

When the commotion died down, the small riverside community looked like an undeserved, insignificant even target for Russian rocket fire, as there were no signs of Ukrainian troops in the area.

But perhaps, in this brutal war of indiscriminate Russian violence, that was precisely the point.

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