A Russian plane crashed into a house. death struck suddenly

CHERNIHIV, Ukraine – Yulia Hrebnyeva’s meticulousness saved her family’s life.

First, he let his wife out to fix the lock on their door.

He then took his children to the basement, insisting that they help him fix the place where they slept every night to avoid a Russian missile attack.

And that is when a Russian Su-34 fighter jet sand fell to the ceiling of his two -story house.

A few blocks away, Vitaliy Serhienko was less fortunate.

The pilot of the crashed Russian plane ejected.

Serhienko and his brother-in-law, Serhiy Tkachenko, heard footsteps on the roof and went out to investigate.

“We want to catch him,” Tkachenko said.

The 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.

Tragedy and opportunity were randomly distributed in the war, and on March 5, when a Russian plane crashed from the sky, they produced two different results in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine.

One family survived, almost miraculously, while Serhienko, in the wrong place at the wrong time, died.

There are additional elements in the equation:

the russian pilot he never had a chance to drop his bombs.

“If these bombs fell in Chernihiv, there would be more victims,” Hrebnyeva said as she inspected the wreckage in her garden more than two months after the accident.

“Our house stopped him.”

Serhienko’s sister, Svitlana Voyteshenko, buried him the next day.

“He was a very good man, he worked hard,” he said.

“Everyone liked it.”

The accident was fatal when a fire spread to a house opposite Hrebnyeva’s yard and an old man lying in bed was burned to death.

Chernihiv, located just 40 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, was quickly surrounded at the start of the war, besieged by Russian troops attacking from both sides.

The attacks were fierce.

Russian forces deliberately bombed critical infrastructure such as water and power stations, as well as food storage, said Oleksandr A. Lomako, head of Cherhiniv City Council, but never gained full control of the center. of the city.

Lomako said prosecutors were able to record 350 people killed as a result of the missile attacks, and it is estimated that another 700 died due to siege-related reasons:

lack of electricity, water and food.

Anger at the destruction and death wrought by Russia simmered among residents as the pilot was ejected from the plane.

Members of the Chernihiv Territorial Defense, a volunteer unit of the army, heard the explosion, said a soldier, Ivan Lut.

He ran to where he thought the pilot might land, saw the orange and white parachute hanging over the house, and started his own persecutionno, he says.

The search next to Tkachenko’s house ended when the Russian pilot, who was named in an intelligence investigation as Maj. Alexander Krasnoyartsev.

His face and chest were covered in blood.

Lying on his back on the ground, he raised his arms, pleading:

“Don’t shoot, I’ve given up!” according to video footage taken on the mobile phone of a Ukrainian soldier.

Soon, a crowd gathered, some seeking revenge.

“We had to fight with our own children to save his life,” Lut said, noting that the soldiers were given to catch the pilot alive.

The co-pilot was already dead when soldiers found him.

The wreckage of the plane, a supersonic medium-range bomber, spread in the yard of Hrebnyeva.

He pointed to the remains of a nearby sauna and small pool. Tulips poke into the metal wreckage of the plane.

Hrebnyeva was walking towards a burnt tree when she saw something in the ruins:

a small pair of jeans owned by his 6-year-old son, still neatly folded, though the drawer that once contained them is unrecognizable.

There are others: red shorts that are full waist but burnt back; a small swimsuit; the sportswear of his 10 -year -old son Denys.

“I almost took it home, washed and ironed,” she said.

returned home Saturday morning after a shift arranging supplies for soldiers defending the city.

He bought a padlock at the hardware store across the street.

His wife, Rostyslav, was in the kitchen boiling dumplings for their three children and another boy who had been separated from his parents after the invasion of Chernihiv on the first day of the war.

Yulia Hrebnyeva’s husband playfully cursed when he released it to install the new lock, he said.

She took the kids to the basement to clean up.

And then they heard the crash. “The bricks are falling,” he said.

Everyone began to tremble. He thought he heard gunshots, he added, but the roof tiles were falling apart.

Her husband, a retired military pilot, sustained burns to his hands and face, but asked for help to get him and the four children out of the basement.

“If my husband didn’t open the door, they burned us alive,” Hrebnyeva said.

From a military perspective, the plane crash was a sign of Ukraine’s success in preventing Russia from having air superiority.

Before the mass aggression began, it was widely believed that Russia could suppress the Ukrainian air force within a few days and establish control over the skies.

But Ukraine was able to overthrow the at least 25 planes Russian fighters, according to the Oryx military analysis site.

More than a third of them were destroyed within days in early March, many by man-portable surface-to-air missiles fired from the shoulder.

Russian pilots are flying low to avoid Ukraine’s missile systems, said Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London.

The plane that crashed on March 5 was among eight or nine others shot down over the course of several days.

That loss rate convinced Russian commanders that flying was low during the day restlesswhich will force pilots to fly at night, when darkness makes it harder for Ukraine to use surface-to-air missiles effectively, Bronk said.

On this flight, the Ukrainian military was able to shoot down the fighter jet before it dropped all its weapons:

footage of the same type of plane that flew the next day, released by the Russian Defense Ministry, showed that it was carrying at least eight bombs not guided 500 kilos.

Lut said the pilot told them he had only received missile strike targets while in the air and was unaware they were hitting civilian targets.

Voyteshenko, whose brother was killed in the chicken coop, said the pilot looked him in the eye and told him he was unaware that there were civilians living there.

Did he believe her?

“Of course not,” he said.

Standing next to the spot where his brother was killed, Voyteshenko looked at an apple tree his parents had planted.

He and his brother have been picking its fruit together since they were children.

Her brother began installing insulation and remodeling on the outside of their home last fall.

“Now I don’t know if we can finish this,” he said.

Hrebnyeva was amazed at the events in her family’s life.

“On March 5, I was handing out clothes and food to people,” he added.

“On March 6 we were gone. People started bringing it to us. “

He said he was determined to rebuild his house.

Her husband is currently with the children in Norway.

“I want to stay. I really want to stay here and rebuild my house in this very place, just for despite the Ruscists,” he said, using a neologism for “Russian fascists” that have been prevalent in Ukraine since during the invasion.

“I want to show everyone that war is war, but life goes on,” he added.

“The Ukrainians are strong and unbreakable, invincible.”

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