By Anna Voitenko
KYIV (Reuters) -A wounded woman pinned down by concrete. A man whose leg was badly broken. A child trapped under debris.
The scenes after Thursday’s Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv were tragically familiar: residents picking through debris while awaiting rescuers, often amid the moans and cries of their neighbours.
Among those trying to help was 19-year-old Vladislav Kalashnikov. Despite his own apartment being torn apart in the attack, he had rushed to help his neighbours in a nearby building.
“I didn’t get scared – I went to help right away,” he told Reuters outside the partly wrecked building on Kyiv’s eastern outskirts, where all but one of at least 18 people killed in strikes across the city had died.
Footage captured by the aspiring lawyer on his cell phone in the chaotic aftermath showed a fiery hellscape of twisted metal, gaping brick walls and shattered glass.
After ensuring his family was safe, Kalashnikov rushed to survey the scene, where he found a man immobilised by a broken leg.
“He was screaming for help,” he said. “There was also a child crying for help. We first helped the child, she was under debris.”
Kalashnikov, who appeared calm, also recalled trying, with others, to pull a woman with a gaping head wound out from under a concrete block.
Explosions roared in the background as they worked, his footage showed.
“We couldn’t lift the block,” he said, pausing and casting his eyes downward. It was not immediately clear whether she had survived.
As he spoke, rescue workers carried away bodies in black bags.
Kalashnikov, like many Ukrainians, said he has grown used to the increasingly frequent strikes that Russia, which denies deliberately targeting civilians, has unleashed on Kyiv and other cities.
Yet despite his close brush with the violence, he said he had no intention of leaving Ukraine for safer countries. Earlier this week, the government lifted a ban on men aged 18 to 22 travelling abroad.
“I want to study further,” he said. “I see my future here.”
(Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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