​Oleg Viktorovych is 57 years old, he lives with his 82-year-old mother Nina Mykhailivna on the fifth floor of an apartment building partially destroyed by intense shelling in Chernihiv.

Another 11 families, who, like them, had nowhere to go, are hiding in destroyed apartments. His neighbor on the floor below, also elderly, suffered four strokes and cannot speak, but remained in the house where the room was blown apart. Their story was filmed by Radio Romania Actualità correspondent Ilie Pintja.

VIDEO: Ili Pintya/RRA

“I was resting on the couch when suddenly everything started flying above me. Then I passed out. They took me and took me to the hospital. We have a voltage of 4.0. They gave me first aid, and then they took me to the basement, and I stayed here with my son for a month and ten days. We lived in the basements for a long time, one month and ten days, then we returned to the house,” Nina says in her kitchen on the fifth floor, where she cooked food on a road stove.

Photo: Ilie Pintea/RRA

The authorities were preparing for the possibility of a new ground offensive, so new lines of defense were created at the approach to Chernihiv from the Russian border. The consequences of the hostilities here were also visible at the cemetery in the city, where a monument to Ukrainian soldiers who died in the battles in Donbas in 2014 was also damaged by firefights with armored vehicles.

Photo: Ilie Pintea/RRA

Chernihiv is an important city on the map of the war in Ukraine, because it is 150 kilometers from Kyiv and 70 kilometers from the border with the Russian Federation, and on this axis it is an outpost of the defense of the capital.

Therefore, it was attacked from the first day of the war, and the intensive bombardment of the city was accompanied by landings of ground troops, which engaged in battles with local defense forces in the Chernihiv area.

The siege of the city is visible at every step: from the destroyed bridge at the entrance to Chernihiv from the Kyiv side to hundreds of buildings destroyed by bombing.

In the center, not far from the imposing theater building, the Hotel “Ukraine” was destroyed by a 500-kilogram bomb that fell on the building.

According to local authorities, the building was evacuated, so no one was injured. A few hundred meters from the bomb, several high-rise buildings were bombed and hundreds of apartments were destroyed.

The stadium of the local football team was also bombed, although there is not a single military facility in the area, the Chernihiv library, which operated in a historical landmark building, was partially destroyed.

Before the war, more than 280,000 people lived in Chernihiv, and today their number has decreased by less than half. There is no exact data on the flow of refugees from the region, as some are returning home, but all who had somewhere to go left.

Photo: Ilie Pintea/RRA

Hundreds of houses were destroyed in the city, and the situation in the neighboring villages is even worse: in Novoselivka, 168 houses were completely destroyed in the battle with armored vehicles, and volunteers brought here several dozen modular houses so that those who have them could leave them in the open air, so that there would be a place to shelter.

Those who had nowhere to go were left to live in bombed-out homes, despite having only partial access to utilities and risking their lives by staying in destroyed appliances, RRA correspondent Ilie Pintya reports.