Borodyanka

Borodyanka, Ukraine c. 2024

You can still hear their screams, even two years later. It’s as if the concrete walls absorbed the final pleas of the families huddled in that basement, releasing them at night in a haunted echo. They were told it would be safe underground, that missiles couldn’t penetrate so deep—until one did. A direct hit to the apartment block above, and the entire structure collapsed, suffocating everyone beneath. The basement, meant to be a fortress against the storm, became a cruel mass grave instead.

I stand in what remains of their home, in the town of Borodyanka—once home to 13,000 people, now a symbol of unimaginable loss. The living room is frozen in a surreal snapshot of 2022: unopened bills scattered across the table, a half-finished crossword, a parking ticket for a car that no longer exists. Someone once frowned at that ticket, grumbling about how to pay it before the deadline. They thought they had “tomorrow,” as if normal life would continue indefinitely. But tomorrow never came. Instead, they fled downstairs with children in tow, clinging to each other in desperate hope that the basement walls could shield them from the war rumbling above.

They never imagined that the entire apartment block could fall. That the air strike on March 1 would obliterate these nine-story buildings, burying whole families who believed they’d emerge to see another sunrise, another rent payment, another weekend plan. There was no military facility here. The bombs simply found civilians. And when local residents tried to dig people out of the rubble, the advancing Russian columns—some accompanied by Kadyrovites from Chechnya—fired on them. At least, that’s what locals who survived long enough to tell the tale reported. Mercy was absent, replaced by the ominous cruelty of an occupation that targeted anyone attempting rescue.

Even now, my chest tightens at the sight of these crushed remnants. I tread carefully through a living room that used to brim with conversation and idle jokes. Above me, the fractured ceiling gapes open to the sky, and a cold wind drifts through, as if mourning the souls who once found shelter here. In that wind, it’s easy to believe you can still hear soft echoes of their final cries. The details around me are heartbreakingly ordinary: a child’s sled broken in the corner, a scatter of toys half-buried under bricks. Objects that once signaled life and possibility now serve as dismal markers of a tragedy too immense to fathom.

Borodyanka was one of the first frontiers of the Russian assault on Kyiv, barely 35 kilometers from the capital. On March 1, planes rained down rocket fire, flattening entire high-rises to their foundations. Families who had huddled in basements were buried alive, a horror no words can adequately describe. For weeks, the town remained under the occupiers’ heel, with columns of tanks rolling in on February 27 and a wave of brutality following right after them. They left the populace in terror, blocking any attempt at rescue. Even removing the bodies of those shot or tortured was forbidden. Only after the occupying forces withdrew on April 1 could anyone resume the rescue operations. By then, it was too late—no one had survived under the rubble.

Taras Shevchenko’s statue in the central square became a chilling symbol of Borodyanka’s suffering. Photos show the bust, riddled with bullets, its head bowed as if in grief against the background of demolished residential blocks. The image shocked the world, a haunting reminder that even in death, voices demanding freedom and human dignity can be silenced but not forgotten. Homes, cars, personal belongings—everything lay strewn amid twisted metal. The roads were littered with wreckage where desperate families had tried to flee, but the occupiers spared none. Nearby villages fared no better; the devastation stretched across fields and rural hamlets, leaving behind scorched earth and traumatized survivors.

Days after the liberation, the streets were still perilous. The Russian troops had left a deadly calling card, mining the town before their retreat. For some time, Borodyanka was sealed off for demining work. The Ukrainian authorities, including Minister of Internal Affairs Denys Monastyrskyi, called this one of the most ruined towns in the entire Kyiv region. And the Prosecutor General, Iryna Venediktova, confirmed that the civilian toll here may well be the worst of all. Photographs that leaked online, initially too horrific to be real, turned out to be no staged set or cheap prop. They were raw evidence of a peaceful community turned into charred debris. A place you might once have driven through on the way to the capital, now reduced to an apocalyptic landscape of shattered buildings and battered vehicles.

I can’t step away from the rubble of this particular home without feeling my throat close up. War so casually snuffs out futures. People who had been planning birthday parties or grocery lists a day earlier found themselves kneeling in the dark, listening to the overhead roar of planes. In that final moment, they must have prayed—some perhaps quietly, others screaming—for a miracle that never came. Buried under thousands of tons of concrete, they likely heard the crash of each floor above collapsing, inching closer to them, stealing the air from their lungs. The magnitude of that terror is enough to bring even the hardest souls to tears.

Standing in the skeleton of these walls, I’m forced to reckon with how fragile human life is. Each breath I take feels like a gift, each step an undeserved privilege. There’s a ragged sofa near me, a photograph of a father and daughter pinned to a cork board that somehow remains upright. Their smiling faces belong to a time that now feels impossibly distant. The father wears a baseball cap; the girl clutches a teddy bear. It’s hard to envision them huddled in that basement, or even if they made it there, given the speed and ferocity of the attack.

In the aftermath, the scale of destruction is mind-numbing. No one who survived these horrors remains unscarred. Their homes are razed, their memories scattered among ashes. And the dead? Many never had the dignity of a proper burial until much later—some not at all. Even in the frantic scramble to rescue survivors, the Russians fired on any would-be Good Samaritans. It’s the epitome of cruelty: to kill, then to deny any final grace of closure.

I imagine the moment the bombs fell, the sky still gray with winter gloom, sirens wailing if they even had time to sound. People would have scurried into basements, convinced that thick concrete floors might shield them. Then the roar overhead, the impact, and the unthinkable. To lose everything in a heartbeat, sealed off from daylight by collapsing floors. Maybe in those last moments, someone managed a final prayer, or whispered words of comfort to a child too frightened to cry. In that darkness, hope would flicker only to vanish under an avalanche of rubble.

Even after liberation on April 1, with the Russians withdrawing from Kyiv’s outskirts, Borodyanka’s torment wasn’t over. Landmines and booby traps still lurked, the ruinous byproducts of a retreating army bent on maximizing suffering. Helicopters flew overhead delivering medical supplies and searching for survivors. Military engineers combed through the debris, heads bent low, searching for wires and triggers that could claim more lives in the blink of an eye.

Journalists and relief workers arriving in Borodyanka described the silence as deafening, the scale of the wreckage too vast to process. In the central square, the bullet-riddled bust of Taras Shevchenko loomed like a weeping sentinel, a universal poet who once wrote about freedom, now standing amidst utter devastation. Meanwhile, overhead power lines dangled uselessly, storefront windows shattered, and vehicles lay abandoned, half-crushed under collapsed facades.

I replay these images in my mind: the shape of a sled in the rubble, a stuffed toy peeking from a crevice in concrete, children’s shoes scattered like fallen leaves. Each item is a testament to ordinary life, now in tatters. And what weighs me down most is knowing that beyond these items, the intangible threads of love, dreams, and everyday banter were also lost in that final cascade of dust. The idea that tomorrow was guaranteed proved deadly, a false comfort extinguished in mere seconds.

This place is an open wound, a reality shaped by Russia’s relentless aggression, indifferent to civilian lives. Some analysts say the entire region could take decades to rebuild—physically and emotionally. The cost in resources is tremendous; the cost in human spirit is incalculable. People who once fussed over minor details, like how to pay a pesky parking ticket, are now forced to scrounge for a place to sleep without caved-in ceilings, forced to bury neighbors with their own hands.

Looking up at the vacant hole where an apartment block once stood, I’m reminded that everything we take for granted—waking up to sunlight, complaining about bills or rent, planning for a holiday—can disappear in one monstrous blast. And so I force myself to breathe deeply, to linger on this sadness rather than run from it. Because in a world where a quiet Ukrainian town can be reduced to dust for no discernible reason, choosing to care, to remember, might be the only way to honor the souls who perished here.

Yes, you can still hear their screams in the silence, because the memory of them resonates through every fractured beam and twisted pipe. Their last moments imprint themselves on the living, a solemn warning of what happens when violence rules unchallenged. Today, Borodyanka stands as a graveyard of shattered homes and unfulfilled tomorrows, bearing witness to the darkest capacity of humankind—and the desperate need for compassion in a time when empathy often feels like a fragile flame in a howling storm.