A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST. SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2022 EZ RE A
war in ukraine
people fleeing Kyiv clog checkpoints here as
they make their long drive toward safety.
Bila Tserkva is also a hub for humanitarian
aid and military deliveries into the capital
and further east. Much of the energy of the
military volunteers and city officials here is
focused on getting the right materials to the
places they are needed.
The stalling of the 40-mile Russian convoy
of tanks of military vehicles in their effort to
surround Kyiv has allowed this essential
corridor to fortify and remain open at least for
the moment.
“We’ve had some time to prepare,” said
Khokhol, 36, who served with the Ukrainian
military in the east in 2014 and 2015 after
Russia annexed Crimea. But they still expect
Russian forces attempt to close off this
relatively safe passage. “They wouldn’t bomb
it unless it was a strategic point,” he said.
Airstrikes have struck sporadically since
Russia launched its invasion, hitting mostly
infrastructure and military targets. The city
has long had a strong military presence. But
KYIV FROM A1 the Saturday blast, which Ukrainian officials
say was caused by a Russian rocket, struck a
residential area.
Khokhol raced through largely deserted
streets to the blast site, the eggs and pasta he
had been planning to take to his family, who
have evacuated to a nearby village, sliding
around the back seat. By the time he got there,
firetrucks had arrived at the large crater in
the middle of a cluster of brick homes built for
the wealthy around 15 years ago.
Some of the homes were scorched black.
The roofs of several buildings had been
ripped entirely off. The blast had hit a gas line,
and vapors shimmered in the air as firefight-
ers watched flames jump from the earth.
Karina Maniukina, 16, was making pan-
cakes in her kitchen when the blast struck the
street outside. “There was just an orange
light,” she said. There was dried blood on the
side of her face where she was hit by the spray
of glass. “I thought I was going to die.”
Maniukina was home alone at the time.
Her mother and brother were out at the
market. She saw a t eenage boy being taken
away with glass in his abdomen. Others said
an older woman who had suffered injuries to
her face was hospitalized, but no one was
killed.
A neighbor helped pick glass shards out of
her neck as she stood in the blown-out
kitchen. Others cleaned and swept. Outside
her home, investigators pulled twisted frag-
ments of metal out of the wreckage to send for
further study. With no military infrastructure
nearby, no one was sure what the target might
have been.
Maniukina and her family had considered
fleeing the city, but her mother had decided to
stay to help displaced children. When her
mother returned home, she sat down to play
the family’s white grand piano in their
glass-strewn living room. Now, like so many
others here, they were preparing to leave their
home.
“We will go somewhere,” Maniukina said.
Perhaps that will be Poland or the Carpathian
Mountains. They aren’t sure where. “Bila
Tserkva is very dangerous now.”
Those who have stayed are turning their
efforts to war. When Russia invaded, Khokhol
decided to join with friends and formersoldiers to make their own unit, rather than
enlist the local territorial defense force. They
procure what they can from abroad, as
volunteers focus on bringing it in over the
border. “That’s what we do day and night,” he
said.
A contact with factories that made timber
saws he used in his woodcutting business is
now manufacturing crossed metal “hedge-
hogs” to block tanks. “Getting bulletproof
vests into the country is a nightmare,” Khok-
hol said, so his unit started making those as
well.
A local restaurant has become a sorting
station for aid and medication, now stacked
up on wooden shelves inside. “The places in
the country give us their requests, and we
send out exactly what they need,” he said.
The supplies go not only to the military but
also to internally displaced people, or anyone
who needs it. Truck drivers who are unwilling
to go onward unload their cargo here. “Then
we find drivers with balls, and they go
onward,” Khokhol said.Anastacia Galouchka contributed to this report.Rocket blast hammers a residential area
at mouth of an escape route south of Kyiv
PHOTOS BY WOJCIECH GRZEDZINSKI FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTCLOCKWISE FROM MAIN: Damaged buildings in a residential
area of Bila Tserkva, 50 miles south of Kyiv. A woman and an
emergency worker stand outside a home damaged by a blast that
Ukrainian officials say was caused by a Russian rocket. A former
soldier known as Khokhol formed a local militia group of friends
and fellow veterans to support soldiers and the Territorial Defense
Forces against Russian advances in Bila Tserkva, which has been
one of the few relatively safe passages in and out of the capital. A
man jumps out of a damaged building in Bila Tserva on Saturday.
Karina Maniukina, a teenager who lives in Bila Tserva, was making
pancakes in her kitchen when the blast struck a street outside. Her
mother, who decided to remain in the city instead of flee, plays t he
grand piano in their living room with glass strewn about the floor
after the blast shattered all three windows.