'The impact was so powerful that my socks flew off' — What happened in Kvitneve, where people died at railway station

"The train was running late"

Near the railway station at half past 9 in the morning, quite a few cars are parked. The cargo area of a white Fiat minibus marked “Funeral Transport” is still empty. The ambulances are already gone as 12 injured have been taken to hospitals.

Access to the tracks themselves is ringed by police tape. About a dozen railway workers are repairing the damaged tracks. There is no electricity — they are hauling the repair equipment by hand.

Where passengers usually wait for the train, the belongings of the dead and injured are scattered: water, food trays, clothes, and glasses. A little farther on lie the bodies. Law enforcement officers examine them.

“There are allegedly eight dead here… We are repairing the tracks,” one of the railway workers says.

At 9:50 a.m., a notification about an air-raid alert arrives on the phone; a little later, the street siren switches on. Telegram channels are reporting a threat of ballistic missile launches. We decide to go down from the tracks to the nearby trees. Law enforcement officers and railway workers also leave the place where they had just been working.

Among the trees, we come across an uncovered body of a man. Perhaps, just as we are doing now, he was looking here for shelter from the ballistic missiles at night. The alert ends after nine minutes. Workers from the funeral services begin transferring the discovered body into a bag.

The impact was so powerful that my socks flew off

Anastasia lives with her mother, Svitlana Petrivna, and her 89-year-old grandmother on one of the most heavily damaged streets in Kvitneve. Thick smoke is still visible from her yard. It is the logistics warehouses burning that the Russians hit overnight into August 5.

“As soon as the alert went off, I said: ‘Mom, are we going?’ And that is it, right away a missile — just a second. I then fell to the floor. You know, I never understood why people’s sneakers fly off when a car hits them. Well, here it is — my socks flew off. I walked barefoot over the glass… Can you imagine?” Anastasia adds.

A few hours before the missile attack, a strike drone fell right behind their house.

“Everything started burning… People ran over and tried to put out the flames themselves before the rescuers arrived. I also have a bedridden grandmother, so the most important thing for me was to carry her out of the house. Later, the grandmother was taken to the Brovary hospital,” Anastasia recounts.

In the apartment, the windows were blown out, the roof was smashed, plaster crumbled, and the second floor is in an emergency condition. Two cars standing in the open are covered with construction debris.

Workers from the village council recorded the damage and promised funds for restoration. But for that amount, Anastasia says, “you cannot even install a roof.”

Russia wants us to beg Zelenskyy to end the war on their terms

Yuriy and Svitlana live across from Anastasia. Yesterday was Yuriy’s birthday; they celebrated away from home. When they returned, their street was on fire:

“We arrived and the security police, we were right there together… We could not get in anywhere because everything had jammed. Both the doors and the gates… Well, we somehow climbed in and hid in the basement, because the explosions were simply terrible — everything around was crumbling. It was already curfew then, and we could neither leave nor get in. It is a good thing the wind was not toward us, so we somehow managed to spend the night here — we lay down in the cars and stayed like that until morning,” Svitlana recounts while collecting window glass.

Inside the house, there are still cracks from the previous strike. This time, the same windows that had been replaced after 2022 flew out again. Many of their neighbors left the village the day before, because they assumed the Russians would strike the warehouses.

“This is still revenge for the fact that we strike their warehouses and try to knock out their military logistics… But with us, everything hits right into the houses where, for example, there are small children. And where there are adult people, like our neighbor… You see, they want to exhaust the Ukrainians so that we raise our paws and beg: ‘Mr. President Zelenskyy, end the war on their terms.’ We do not want that,” Svitlana believes.

Yuriy shows the door that no longer closes and the garage gates warped by the blast wave.

Valentyna lives a little farther down the street. Because of the strike, her windows cracked, and a ceiling light fixture in the room shattered. The roof is also damaged.

“I read that in Dnipro they hit food warehouses, so I thought, that means we should expect it too… Right when it banged after midnight, the police came to us. We then quickly all went down to the basement,” she recounts.

Overnight into August 5, the Russians targeted warehouse facilities of civilian enterprises. In the Brovary district, they hit the Epicentr logistics center; an employee died there. The attack also destroyed the Rozetka warehouse complex in Brovary.

Overall, the Russian attack overnight into August 5 in Kyiv and the region took the lives of at least 17 people; another 44 were injured. Rescuers are still addressing the fallout. The number of casualties may grow.