One Kyiv family’s flight to safety tells the tale of horror of Russian shelling

As the fighting raged around them, the Zakharchuk family heaved themselves out of the wreckage of their house and ran for it. They only made it as far as their next-door neighbours’, but at least it was intact and unshelled.

Bogdan, the 17-year-old, was seared on his face and body, and had shrapnel embedded in a broken upper arm. His mother and stepfather had severe burns too from the missile that had landed on the house, but for two days they could all only shelter and hide the best they could.

They had no phone left to call for help, and in any case there was no way for help to arrive through the battlefield. Ambulance crews say that they cannot go to the front for fear of being shot at.

The cavalry — in the form of the Ukrainian army — arrived to save them on Friday. They dashed to the road to meet them, and were driven to the hospital in the nearby town of Brovary, east of Kyiv, where they lay on Saturday afternoon, still in a state of shock.

 “For two days, I was freezing, and in so much pain,” Bogdan said. He described how the Russian soldiers came through their village, Zalyssia, a few miles north east of Brovary, and then how the Ukrainians pushed back and took over again, enabling their escape.

Blood and pus seeped through the bandages swathing his face, arm and back. A wisp of teenage beard partially hid a child’s face whose eyes were downcast and fearful.

His tale of the battle would seem to confirm a picture of Kyiv being a city under siege, holding out against overwhelming Russian forces. While tank convoys head down the road from the east of the country, trying to break into Brovary as a gateway to the capital itself, street-to-street combat and shelling also continue in the northwestern suburbs of Irpin and Bucha.

In fact, the pain of the Zakharchuk family is more emblematic of a shift in the war, and in Russian strategy. Brovary hospital’s director, Valentin Baganyuk, said the proportion of military to civilian casualties had switched since the first days of the invasion: then, they were treating seven soldiers to every three civilians, but now it was the other way round.

The last week has seen light but regular and random shelling of Kyiv’s suburbs, assumed by its defenders to be a sign of Russian weakness, with Moscow’s tanks having been unable to get near the city itself.

That would match Russian tactics in other wars, in which cities are softened up by attacks on residential areas in order to weaken morale in advance of a main attack.

However, it could also be a sign that the Russian generals have switched their main attention elsewhere.

While other western military analysts have revelled in the discomfort of Russian armoured regiments getting stuck in the mud, and social media have posted clips of Ukrainian farmers towing away captured vehicles, there is an alternative theory that cannot be discounted.

It is clear on the ground that the Russians have given up any immediate attempt to capture or even surround Kyiv. Instead, they want to hold up Ukrainian troops there, and keep the city’s residents on edge, while their greater strength in numbers strips Ukraine of territory that is more useful to President Putin’s longer term chances of claiming a victory.

He now seems certain to take the entire seaboard east of Crimea to the border with Russia. He can then move inland, taking the parts of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk that were not already aligned to Moscow.

The Royal United Services Institute, a London military think tank, argued last week he may also be trying to surround the bulk of the Ukrainian army in the east, thus effectively dismantling it as a threat.

In this case, it said, “the emphasis on Russia’s ability to take major cities as a metric of success will have been an analytical error, as Russia appears more intent on pinning Ukrainian forces in cities like Kharkiv while it bypasses them”.

Under this scenario, Russia could declare a ceasefire and either regroup and resupply its forces, or leave a drastically smaller Ukraine licking its wounds in a “frozen conflict”.

Ukraine might not have lost outright, but it would be weaker and, even if defiant in voice, it would nevertheless be militarily cowed.

Russia may also be sharpening its sword where and when it does apply it. Another of Brovary hospital’s patients was Lieutenant Zhenya, who asked not to give his surname, as his family are now in occupied territory. After 11 years in the army, he is a veteran of Ukraine’s wars with Russia, and has been wounded three already times since the pro-Russian takeover of Donbas in 2014.

His fourth injury, a broken hand, came in resisting a tank assault during the battle which destroyed the Zakharchuk family home.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, five tanks came through his lines before being repelled. An anti-tank missile dispatched one of the five, and the other four turned and retreated, but not before a shell had showered his arm with shrapnel.

Near here, an entire column had been advancing on Kyiv’s eastern outskirts on March 9 when it was attacked by Ukraine’s Bayraktar drones and artillery, wiping it out tank by tank as if in a video game.

The drone images and subsequent Ukrainian photographs of the wreckage were a powerful symbol of the Russian army’s early woes in the war, but Lieutenant Zhenya warned against complacency.

“These five tanks were much better prepared,” he said. “They knew how to fight in formation together, how to manoeuvre. They were organised.”

The idea of a mad rush to seize the city has been abandoned. Instead, the lieutenant and his men were facing concerted thrusts which, judging by the smaller battlegroups, were intended to keep the defenders tied down rather than to overcome a city of 2.8 million people.

The message of those thrusts — that Russian might and fury remain parked on Kyiv’s doorstep — will be backed up by more shelling and bombing, hitting civilians like the Zakharchuks over and over again.

 “I wanted it all to be over, to die, I was in so much pain,” said Bogdan’s stepfather, Victor, 41. He lived to tell the tale, at least until the next time.