With a small broom and a trash can in hand, Olga Prendzhilevich cleans up trash along a road in a quiet suburb of Kyiv, next to a mountain of burnt cars and rubbish.

But he cannot erase the terrible memory – he saw how a government helicopter with the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine crashed into the fog over the kindergarten building. And the frantic mobilization after that to save the children, with their tiny bodies on fire.

“I’m still in shock,” the 62-year-old guard says, the stench still hanging in the air.

Nearby, Oksana Yury, 33, watches as investigators photograph the scene as they try to figure out how Wednesday’s accident happened.

“I thought it was a safe place,” he said. “Now I understand that this does not happen.”

This is a hard life lesson that Ukrainians have had to learn in a week of mourning for at least 59 dead in places that many considered safe from the brutality of the Russian war, now in its 11th month.

Since February, they have witnessed deaths from rocket attacks and frontline fighting, civilians killed in schools, theatres, hospitals and homes. They have suffered irreparable losses: a loved one, a place they call home, and for some, any hope for the future.

But the last week seems to have its own special cruelty.

It started over the weekend when Russian rockets hit a residential complex of about 1,700 people in the southeast of Dnipro. Shelling on 14 January killed 45 civilians, including six children – the deadliest civilian since spring – in an area once considered safe for many who fled the frontline further east.

Then on Wednesday, a helicopter crashed at a kindergarten in the Kiev suburb of Brovary, killing 14 people, including Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky, members of his ministry and the plane’s crew. One child died in the kindergarten, 25 people were injured, including 11 children.

But Ukrainian mourning was not limited to Brovary or the Dnieper.

Aleksey Zavadsky was buried in the cemetery in Butse near the capital after his death in Bakhmut, where fierce battles went on for several months. His fiancée, Anya Korostenkaya, threw mud at his coffin during the funeral. Then she burst into tears.

“The courage of our army and the motivation of the Ukrainian people are not enough,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a press conference on Thursday at the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv.

A day earlier, he appeared via videotape at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he asked a large audience to honor the memory of those killed in a helicopter crash with a moment of silence. His wife Olena Zelenskaya, who came to the forum to personally enlist the support of Ukraine, burst into tears upon learning of the crash.

At an event Thursday at Kiev’s luxurious Fairmont Hotel, US Ambassador Bridget Brink told those in attendance that some embassy staff had been killed in fighting on the front lines.

“I know that many Ukrainians inside and outside the government are suffering right now,” he said, urging diplomats, businessmen and journalists not to lose faith.

In a hospital room in Dnipro, where she is recovering from a rocket attack over the weekend, 40-year-old Olga Botvinova celebrated her “birthday” with balloons. She said it wasn’t her real birthday, but she believes she was reborn as a survivor.

“We intend to continue to live,” he said.

He fled war-torn Donetsk in 2014 when Moscow-backed separatists took over the city. In the spring of 2022, they again had to leave, this time from the city of Kherson after it went over to the Russians.

He thought that they would be safe in the Dnieper.

Rockets hit dozens of apartments. Inside the houses, life is preserved as it was moments before the explosion: in the eighth-floor kitchen with bright yellow walls, a bowl of apples was left untouched.

Many residents are left without windows. Alexei Korneev returned from the Eastern Front to help his wife.

“Our family’s mood has worsened,” he said, adding that they have to deal with power outages amid low temperatures. “But we’re glad we’re alive.”

Clothes, pillows, blankets and mattresses were distributed in different parts of the city.

“Yesterday they had everything, but today they have nothing,” volunteer Ulyana Borzova says about the residents.

“I’m trying to hold on,” he added. “Because otherwise we’ll all drown in sorrow.”

Source: Associated Press.