As Ukraine Makes Gains, Mykolaiv Bears Fierce Russian Attacks

It was a grim ritual that has been repeated again and again across Ukraine, but especially here.

A body was wrapped in black plastic and strapped to a stretcher. Rescue workers, heads down, pulled the stretcher through a crowd. Behind them stood a smoking apartment building with a gigantic hole punched through it. As the rescue workers approached, the onlookers parted and let the stretcher pass, in silence.

A journalist asked a military official: Is this revenge for what’s happening in Kherson? The military official shook his head. No, this was just another day in Mykolaiv.

Despite the Ukrainian battlefield successes on Friday, with Russian troops fleeing the strategic city of Kherson and Ukrainian forces moving in, the Russians are still heaping misery on many parts of Ukraine — and especially in Mykolaiv, a Black Sea port city that is only about 50 miles from Kherson.

On Friday, a day when countless Ukrainians were celebrating victory in Kherson, seven Ukrainians died from a Russian missile strike here in Mykolaiv.

Mykolaiv is resigned to more misery and random death. Though Russian forces have never taken the city, they have relentlessly bombed it since the first days of the conflict. Many residents seem so beleaguered, almost as if they could not imagine an end to the war.

Friday’s attack fit the pattern of so many others. In the middle of the night, a barrage of Russian missiles tore across the sky, heading straight toward a Ukrainian city as its people slept.

“The Russians will do what the Russians want,” said Viktoriia Bas, who has lived here all of her life.

A Ukrainian military spokesman made the same point, albeit more technically.

“The enemy has S-300 missiles that can fly 150 kilometers,” said Dmytro Pletenchuk, the spokesman. “Soon, they will have Iranian missiles that they can shoot from 500 kilometers away. They can fire from the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. What happens in Kherson won’t stop this.”

Nataliia Akimina, who was working a guard shift outside a large garage near Mykolaiv’s train station on Friday, said she had seen the missiles streak right above her head around 3 a.m.

“I heard the shriek, and all the dogs started barking. Actually, the dogs started barking right before I heard it,” she said.

One of the missiles slammed into a five-story residential apartment block on Prospekt Myru, or Peace Avenue. No known military targets were nearby. Since the war began in February, Mykolaiv has been bombed on all but 44 days, officials said. More than 150 people have been killed, and hundreds more wounded.

The dead on Friday included an electrician and his wife, whose birthday was today; several older residents who had refused to leave Mykolaiv; and one retired military man known as Uncle Hena.

Oleksandr Sviezhentsev, a crane operator who owns the apartment next door, talked to Uncle Hena all the time.

“We used to sit right there, on that bench,” he said as he stabbed his finger toward a green wooden bench, now surrounded by broken tables and ripped-apart walls. “He was good.”

It was Uncle Hena’s body that was the last to be removed, his wife watching with wet, gray eyes.

At the same time that rescue crews were combing through the rubble, thousands of people were lining up at places throughout the city, waiting for water. Mykolaiv, home to half a million people before the war and now maybe half that, has no drinkable tap water because in April the Russian army blew up all of the freshwater pipes supplying the city. That has left the people here dependent on handouts.

In one shopping-center parking lot, a huge crowd gathered after two truckloads of bottled water had arrived. The crowd was dressed in heavy coats. Their puffs of breath were visible in the thin, wintry air. They trudged forward as one.

“Don’t panic!” a soldier yelled from a megaphone, standing by the trucks. “There is enough for everyone. But don’t circle back in the line to take more.”

Ms. Bas waited with two children.

“It’s all misery. The schools are closed, and learning is online, but we have no internet at home,” she said. “My husband works at a carwash, but business is bad, so each day he brings home only 200 hryvnias,” or about $5.

The temperature is falling. And she wasn’t sure when she would get heat.

“It’s not like we were rich before the war,” she said. “But never did I have to ask for handouts.”

“I am trying to be strong” she said. “I am pretending to be strong.”

She turned to leave. Her 10-year-old daughter followed, walking briskly. In her hand, she clutched a pack of chocolate cookies that she had just been given. But in her eyes, she looked as if she were almost lost in the growing crowd.