People dig through the rubble of houses that were destroyed by Russian bombs in Borodyanka, a small town not far from Kyiv. They are looking for the missing.
Antonina’s eyes are filled with tears and lack of sleep. She is watching as someone picks through the debris of the building where her son used to live on the third floor.

It is too long for the 65-year-old mother, whose own home was not hit by the fighting. She can’t stand the long wait.

On the evening of March 1, a Russian plane dropped a bomb on the middle of the five-story building. This happened a few days after the start of the war.

Some time ago, the ten apartments that once stood here were turned into a pile of concrete and broken metal.

In Antonia’s brown coat and blue woollen hat, she says: “There were people in this building at night. It was dark.”

She is alone on a chair in a corner of what used to be the garden of the building. With both hands, she holds a cane in front of her and rests her head on top. She has a sad, thoughtful look on her face as she looks at the diggers work.

A woman says, “The people who lived in two blocks on either side of the building were hurt, but they’re still alive.” “Those who stayed in the middle are all dead.”

‘Maybe he’s still there, though.

Her son Yuri, 43, hasn’t talked to her since the bomb went off.

“Maybe he got out, maybe he is hurt, or maybe he is still there (under the rubble). I can’t say because I don’t know “Before she bursts into tears, she says this.

This is what you’ll find in the building’s debris: a pair of shoes, some books and a water pistol. There are also clothes and three stuffed animals next to each other in the piles of debris.

This is how it looks: A mattress is stuck in the branches of a tree

It used to be that Lyubov Yaremenko’s apartment had a little balcony on the ground floor of one of the blocks that still stand.

Her brown sofa is covered in a plastic tarp because it’s going to rain.

If she had been able to save any other furniture from her house, it would not have been possible. The blast destroyed everything else.

Several doors came off their hinges and windows were broken. The cabinet doors fell over and clothes were thrown all over the place.

In this case, it was even worse.

Because Lyubov was in the cellar when the bomb went off, she was not in her apartment.

“We stayed underground for almost a month and a half,” says Lyubov, who is still in shock. “Then we ran to a cellar on the other side of the street as they were bombing. I fell and hurt my ribs.”

In this cellar, “it looks like there was a family with young children,” she says. They can’t get there yet.

Almost two kilometres of ruins and devastation now line the main road in Borodyanka. This is how it used to be:

The town, which had about 13,000 people before the war, was retaken by Ukrainian forces at the end of March after Russian troops left the area around Kyiv.

A Ukrainian president said on Saturday that more bad things were still being found out, but he didn’t say how bad they were.

Borodianka, which is northwest of Kyiv, has started to be cleaned up, the man said. “It is much worse there. There are even more people who have been occupied by Russians.”

Borodyanka is a lot worse than Bucha, where dead civilians were found, some with their hands tied behind their backs.

She said on Thursday that 26 bodies had been found so far from two apartment buildings in Borodyanka, Ukraine, that were destroyed in the war.

A taller building with eight floors across from the main square has also been hit by a bomb. One third of its mass has been cut off. A crane is trying to get rid of large parts of its walls that have been blackened by the blast.

It looks like two rescue workers in a cherry picker are going to one apartment at a time to see if there are any bodies in the windows.

As an emergency services worker from Kyiv says: “We would have liked it to be a simple rescue operation, but the strikes took place at the end of February and the beginning of March. We couldn’t do that.”

“We don’t know how many people are still under the buildings that fell, but we have to search all of them.”