Under the bombs in Ukraine, Oleg mourns his wife and wishes to see Putin “dead” and “forever in hell”

Oleg weeps in his house, reduced to rubble by a Russian bombardment that killed his wife Katia in Jytomyr, 150km west of Kiev. He expects two things: for Katia to be “in paradise” and to see Vladimir Putin “dead” and “forever in hell.”

The life of Oleg Rubak It changed brutally on Tuesday night, when he was playing with his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter in the living room of his small wooden and brick house, near the center of Jytomyr.

Like many strategic Ukrainian cities, this garrison town suffered from brief but intense and deadly Russian shelling.

A first missile exploded next to the house of Olegwhere his wife was.

“Her name was Katia, she was 29 years old. One moment I saw her go to our room, and the next moment, nothing, nothing more.” relates this 32-year-old engineer, with a youthful countenance.

Oleg crieshe apologizes, dazed with grief and a sleepless night, or almost.

“I hope that at this moment, she is in paradise, that everything is perfect for her,” he whispers.

Among the rubble of your home, Oleg stands up. “I want the whole world to hear my story” it says. “I was in this room with our one and a half year old daughter. But now you see, this is no longer a house, this is….” Doubt. “Maybe it’s hell.”

The second bomb hit seconds after the first, on the other side of the house. There he left a huge crater 5 meters deep, at the bottom of which is stagnant water mixed with mud, among a mass of remains of walls, structures and furniture.

“I must be strong”

After the explosion, Olegfumbles for her cell phone, turns on her light, and finds her daughter. “He wasn’t moving, and that’s where it all fell apart for me. But then I took her hand, and she started crying. It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Instead, his wife lies under bricks and remains of beams. Oleg digs with his hands, with the energy of despair. “I ripped my fingers off,” she says, showing off her flayed, red-hot phalanges. As he feared, what he finds in the end is Katia’s corpse: the first explosion left her no chance of survival.

Oleg cry again. His father, present, tries to comfort him. The young widower rises again: “I must be strong! I just want everyone to know what happened to me.” repeat again.

And he adds: that Vladimir Putin pays the price for having launched this war: “I wish him death, and I want him to rot in hell, forever.”

“We want to save our land”

According to local authorities, Tuesday night’s shelling in Jytomyr killed at least three residents and injured about twenty people, including several children.

In the center of this town, dozens of people cleaned the remains of a small market completely devastated by the attacks on Wednesday, just in front of the city’s large military academy.

One of the inhabitants, Katarina Chernova, 28, does not hide that from now on she is “afraid”. But she is reassured by local solidarity. “We are all together, we help each other,” she says, “because this is our land and we want to save it.” Therefore, “we do not give up”.

Oleg, for his part, is more pessimistic about Russian military progress: in Jytomyr, he says, “many people would like to leave, but today no one knows where to go.”

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