The village of Zelenyi Hai is situated about 30 kilometers to the east of Mykolaiv. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Zelenyi Hai residents celebrated Village Day every year and launched a waste-sorting initiative. 

The first explosions were heard in Zelenyi Hai on March 4. In one and a half weeks, on March 13, Russian forces carried out an airstrike on the village school. The strike killed seven people and injured three more. The school principal, Olexandr Hnedko, was among the casualties. He was pulled out from under the rubble, but died after two months of treatment. 

We talked with the late principal’s wife, Oksana Hnedko. This is her testimony about a Russian war crime. 

Ви можете прочитати це інтерв'ю українською. 

February 23 was the last day we were happy. My godchildren came to visit us, and we met up with our son’s godparents. On February 24 I’d already heard the first explosion because we lived on the edge of the village. When I rushed to the window, I even saw a distant fire near the Kulbakino airfield.

I was scared and went to my husband. He told me, quite calmly: “Oksana, that’s probably military training. Don’t panic”. I asked: “Sasha, maybe, the kids shouldn’t go to school?”. He said: “Don’t worry. We’ll find out soon”. 

 In a few minutes he received a phone call. Then we called all of the teachers to say: “Stay home today, no one go anywhere. We’ll find out what happened and what will happen next.” Sasha went to work. When he got back home, he said: “I’ll take our son to the city. I reckon it’s serious.”

On February 25, our village mayor received an order that the school staff didn’t need to go [to work], and everyone should stay home. But they were also instructed to prepare the bomb shelter, a structure under the school building.

There wasn’t much to prepare – everything was ready. They brought in chairs, but when people started coming after the first explosions, my husband tried to create [more comfortable amenities] for children, so they could lie down at night and not have to sit up. 

Iryna Rudolfivna, who worked as an organiser at the school, entertained the children [in the bomb shelter], so that they wouldn’t be afraid, I was told later. My husband made sure that everyone had everything they needed: they stocked up on water and candles. He was in charge of this because he was the school principal. The village mayor was also a very responsible man. He was everything to us. 

The first explosions occurred on March 4, causing first structural damage. It wasn’t clear at that point if it was artillery or something else. The roofs of the houses on Yuvileina Street were damaged, [my] mom’s door was torn off. In some houses people survived miraculously because the gables had fallen down. 

From time to time we slept in our son’s godparents’ house at night. I was trying to stay awake to hear when the explosions would start, so we’d all manage to run to the basement. Although we now realise the basement wasn’t a proper bomb shelter.  

Things became unbearable on March 11: we almost never left the basement, and there was a constant sound of shelling above. Our soldiers’  the Ukrainian Armed Forces] position was less than a kilometer away from us. So there was shelling in all directions.

 

It was just an artillery shell whistle, as it is called now, but I didn’t understand what it was at the time. I felt panic and nausea, I was freaking out. I saw my husband rarely because he was staying at school all the time. 

Sometimes he did come to us. I told him we needed to do something, we needed to get out. He said: “Oksana, I still don’t know what to do”. 

On the morning of March 12, at 4 AM – we barely had time to run to the basement – there was a loud explosion, everything was shaking. And then a house in our village set on fire.

That morning we all began to panic and asked our son’s godfather and Sasha to get out of the village. Later I regretted it. On March 12 we all voted. Vania, the godfather, didn’t want to go, but the women insisted. When Sasha came, I asked him but he said: “No. How can I possibly leave? Few people have left the village, people just stay in shelters.” 

So then Vania took us to the city. Sasha stayed, as did the village mayor, Mykola Ivanovych, who also took his family to the city that day.  

On March 13 people  in our village’s Viber chat were saying that there were explosions yet again. I was on the phone with Sasha, asked him to take his mom and leave the village even for a few hours. He said: “Maybe I can take her, arrange it with someone or go by myself – I can’t tell you anything for sure.”

At 1 AM we read in the chat there was an attack on the school. A two-storey concrete building. I thought maybe the school was hit, maybe the windows shattered. The windows had already shattered earlier. But four hours later, a Mykolaiv group posted on social media that the Zelenyi Hai school was destroyed in a Russian airstrike. I saw [from the photos] that there was no way people could survive there because the concrete structure collapsed. 

People standing outside said they heard a hum and saw airplanes before [the attack]. Not one but two airplanes. There were a lot of people – locals – in the shelter. Fortunately, when the rescuers got there, they broke through the entrance to the shelter – there were a few of them. People were able to leave, thank God, everyone was able to leave. 

 They said it was terrible: they were running away, but explosions continued. They just ran helter-skelter through the village. It was totally horrific. I don’t know what exactly happened, whether they were in the shelter before and were  running home – but a blast wave killed two people who were running through the park. They were the Tkachenkos, Nadiia and Serhii, wife and husband. It was impossible to assemble their torn bodies back together. 

The village mayor’s children still had hope; they looked for him for three days. But by March 17 the rescuers had retrieved everyone from the rubble. They announced that the search was over and said they found his dead body in the rubble. Doctors later said he died from injuries immediately after the concrete slabs collapsed. 

[The Russians] knew people were hiding in the shelter. It’s clear from drone footage: people came there every night. If there was heavy shelling, people would go to the shelter in the evening to rest, so they wouldn’t have to run there at night; there was a curfew in place. 

When I found out about the explosion at the school, I was desperate. I had no hope. I received a call from the hospital, from Hospital No. 3 in Dubky. A fellow villager worked there, Lina Harasimova. She said: “Oksana Mykhailivna, don’t worry, Olexandr Serhiyovych was taken to the hospital. He is injured, his legs were trapped, but he is alive and nothing is threatening his life now.”

I was so happy at that moment. Whatever it was, I thought he would recover. The two months that followed were so difficult. His kidneys failed, because he had been trapped under the rubble for almost nine hours. Later Sasha said the rescuers arrived just an hour or two hours after [the explosion]. But the shelling started again. They put out the fire that had started. There was a frightening hum. You can hear it on the video. They were forced to leave. He heard them, but they didn’t hear him because of the loud noise. 

Sasha said that a miracle happened when the rescuers came back. He said he heard everything they were saying despite the persistent noise; he tried to shout to get their attention. They kept searching but didn’t hear him. The rescuers found a soldier, who was also hiding from the shelling, just a little above where Sasha was. They pulled him out from under the rubble. They were about to leave but one of them said: “Be quiet, I saw a flash of light.” Sasha used a flashlight – he didn’t lose consciousness even for a minute. When all the appliances were turned off, the rescuers finally heard him. It happened just as they were about to leave. 

We fought for his life for two months. No one spotted that his potassium levels were higher than average. It was a symptom of compression syndrome, which causes internal organs to stop functioning. In his case it was his kidneys, they failed. He was on dialysis for a month and a half, we thought they’d work on their own. 

He also had a pelvic fracture. He was lying motionless for a month and a half. Then he managed to start walking and he was discharged for Easter, but we returned in just a day and a half, because he was lying for a long time in the hospital and had contracted pneumonia. We returned to the intensive care unit, and though the pneumonia was severe, he recovered in a week because of his strong will. Already, everything was fine with his lungs. But kidneys are so particular, that even a little bit of the wrong diet, the wrong amount of water can affect them…

At night he deteriorated. It just happened, in 4 hours. I could already see that I was losing him. So I asked to stay with him. 

On May 12 he passed away. I asked for a cremation. I only had one request – to take his body and do it at home. It was so dangerous. But Vanya, the child’s godfather, said not to worry, he'd do everything. We’ll take him home. Because I knew that if he was buried away from home, his body would be difficult to recover. 

On May 12 at 4 AM Sasha passed away, and at 1 PM we buried him in Zelenyi Hai. Ivan took him and people came. I immediately posted on Facebook when it happened, when Sasha passed away. Vanya said they’d just started to bury him when shelling started again, but they managed to finish and leave. 

I think he could have been rescued. We were in the sensitive care unit, and needed dialysis to save him. It would lower the potassium level. Dialysis removes the excess. But on May 11 they decided not to do it. Probably specialists working in the sensitive care unit are mainly anaesthetists. So it happened. 

It would not have happened if not for the russian missiles. He would not have been hospitalised and he would still be alive, if all this had not happened. First of all I blame that day, I blame myself for leaving. But no matter how much I blame myself, I can’t change anything. I mean he would not have left his job. He felt a responsibility for the people staying there. A lot of people called me in that month, they thanked me and said he was a responsible and worthwhile man.

Author: Alex Malyshenko
Translator: Kate Melnyk
editors: Olya Loza, Sam Harvey, Yaroslav Druziuk
Photo: Oksana Hnedko