The story of Ninelle Chernyshenko from Borodianka
AUTHOR:
On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ninelle was not afraid. She, like other residents of Borodianka, believed that everything would be fine and she didn’t want to leave her home.
However, on 1st March, a woman saw Russian military equipment driving down her street. Ninelle and her family did not spend that night at home, but when she returned the next day, she witnessed real horror: smashed windows and doors in the houses, a completely devastated street and corpses of people lying all around.
Ninelle didn’t know where to step or how to enter her own apartment, but she and her family mustered their strength and took everything they could from their home. No one from Ninelle’s apartment complex was killed, although there were many casualties from the neighbouring house, which had been bombed. The street was littered with corpses, arms, legs and heads and dogs were snatching at human remains.
“What’s peculiar is that all the bombs that the Russians dropped on Borodianka were so accurate that there are no craters anywhere near the houses; they were all direct hits,” Ninelle explained.
In the first days of the war, she explained, the Russians shot at people they happened to spot, whoever they were.
“I heard that Russian soldiers came to the house where a family lived. They told the father that they wanted his wife and they took her away. When he began protesting, he was shot in front of his family. Then the Russians shot two of their own soldiers so that they wouldn’t tell anyone about what had happened.”
Ninelle also remembered the story of how Russian invaders brazenly took a house on the outskirts of Borodianka. To control the crossing, they just went in and shot the whole family that lived there.
“They were looking around for Nazis. They found none so they just killed ordinary people instead,” Ninelle said.
While Ninelle's family could not leave Borodianka, they simply prayed and watched as bombs fell on the neighbouring houses. In those moments, Ninelle’s house would shake and several times she resigned herself to her death.
Fortunately, Ninelle and her family managed to escape. However, after returning home, she found her apartment completely destroyed, the car damaged beyond repair and her garage demolished. In fact, the family was left with absolutely nothing. That said, Ninelle is glad that at least they are alive.
“We’ll rebuild everything. We’ll be fine. And our military will repel all the enemies. I always knew that victory will be ours, Crimea will be ours and everything will be ours again. I simply could not believe, however, that it would come at such a price,” Ninelle admits.
The material was created based on testimonies collected by documenters of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group.
These pictures are created by artificial intelligence. They are NOT real. They are illustrations of the stories we tell. Most of these stories could not have been fixed by the camera. At the same time, there is documentary work by hundreds of Ukrainian and international photographers who produce real, and so much painful, documentation of this war. Check photographs by Oleksandr Glyadelov, Maksym Dondiuk, Mstyslav Chernov and Yevhen Malolietka, Andriy Dubchak, Yulia Kochetova, and many others.