“At the time of the explosion, the children were having breakfast,” says a shocked Natalia Slessareva, 54, an employee of the Stanitsa Luganska kindergarten, bombed on Thursday in eastern Ukraine.
“The explosion took place around 09:00 in the morning. I was in the laundry room. The blast wave threw me towards the door. I no longer felt the right side of my head,” he told AFP.
In the sports room of the nursery, a wall is pierced by a shell. The bricks that fell are now among the children’s toys.
At the time of the explosion, there were twenty children in the dining room, who were going to go down to the sports hall right after. “If the explosion had occurred 15 minutes later, the consequences could have been catastrophic,” adds Slessareva.
In normal times, 57 children usually attend this school, but this time, most had stayed home due to anti-Covid restrictions.
Stanitsa Luganska, a small town on the front line of eastern Ukraine, was hit by shelling on Thursday. Western leaders reacted indignantly as separatists denounced manipulation by Kiev.
According to the Ukrainian Army, 32 shells fell on the city. Three school employees were injured. Another projectile fell on the children’s playground, where a funnel-shaped crater can be seen between two slides.
– “I can’t calm down” –
Alerted by the school, Natalia, 38, ran to pick up her two-year-old son. “We rushed into the car with my husband to pick up the child,” she said, without giving her last name.
“I was very scared, there is no bomb shelter in this nursery, just thick walls. You can see they were damaged. I can’t calm down,” he added.
A part of the shops in the city remained closed after the bombings due to lack of electricity.
Some residents covered their windows with plastic bags as many were blown out by the blasts.
“It was quiet before New Year, but now they’ve started shooting harder,” observes a man collecting shards of glass on his second-floor balcony of a small building.
Since 2014, eastern Ukraine has been immersed in a war between Ukrainian forces and separatist fighters, supported militarily by Moscow, according to Kiev and Western countries.
Despite numerous ceasefire attempts, some of which were relatively respected, the fighting never fully ceased, causing more than 14,000 deaths.
Since November, Moscow has concentrated more than 100,000 soldiers near the Ukrainian border, raising fears of a military operation against Kiev and a large-scale resumption of fighting in the area.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenksi denounced the bombing as a “provocation” and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused Moscow of wanting to “discredit” Kiev to justify an invasion.
The Luhansk separatists, for their part, accused Kiev of having increased the number of heavy weapons bombardments to “push the conflict towards an escalation”.