AThere is still a basket of apples on the table, unwashed dishes in the sink, a pot on the stove. The wall against which the table and chairs stood is missing – it was torn away when a rocket hit a nine-story apartment block in Dnipro on Saturday. The yolk-yellow cabinets and green wall tiles are a luminous focal point amid the rubble of the destroyed home. This contrast quickly made the brutally open view of a Ukrainian family’s kitchen a powerful image of how Russia’s war is destroying lives far from the front lines.
A family of four lived in the apartment with the yellow kitchen until Saturday. The father was well known in Dnipro: Mychayolo Korenowskyj taught children and young people at the city’s sports academy, he had received awards for his work as a boxing coach and headed the regional team of the Dnipropetrovsk region. According to local media reports, he had just returned from a boxing match at the time of the attack, his wife Olga Korenovskaya was walking their two daughters, and he should have joined them a little later. But that didn’t happen anymore. Korenowskyj is one of at least 45 people killed in the attack. “Instead of my apartment, where I lived with my family for nine years, there was only this hole,” his wife later wrote on Instagram. A video that gives an insight into the family’s former life quickly spread on social networks. It shows one of the daughters blowing out the candles on a cake in the flamboyant kitchen on her fourth birthday.
#War #Ukraine #victims #Dnipro
