SUMY, Ukraine (Reuters) – Yevheniia Stepanets fled to Poland with her family after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but her children begged her to return home to the city of Sumy.
Now that they are back in their native city near the border with Russia, their days are often filled with the din of drones and the threat of missile strikes.
On Monday, the apartment block where they live was damaged in a missile strike which officials said wounded 101 people including 23 children. Stepanets, 42, now wonders whether she may have to move again.
“I think we’ll need to leave,” she said, visibly exhausted, in her damaged kitchen. “I don’t know, I think it’s necessary, honestly.”
Russian forces have continued attacking Ukrainian towns and cities far behind the front line even though talks have begun on halting three years of war.
Officials said Monday’s attack on Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine, damaged 19 residential buildings and two schools and blew out more than 2,000 windows.
The city and surrounding region have come under increasing attack since a rapid incursion by Ukrainian forces last August into the nearby Russian region of Kursk.
On Monday, Stepanets rushed home from work when she heard the explosion. She frantically called her 18-year-old daughter, Anna Serdiuk, who had been looking after her 11-year-old brother and seven-year-old sister.
Serdiuk said that luckily neither of her siblings had wanted to play in the yard before it was rattled by the blast wave and strewn with debris.
“It’s the most frightening (thing) that can take place – when you don’t know whether or not you’ll die today,” Serdiuk told Reuters.
Sitting inside their shattered apartment, she described the emotional toll of living under constant stress.
She does not want to leave Sumy again, but she has not ruled it out.
“Everything has just piled on, and it continues to pile on and pile on, and I don’t know when it will end,” she said.
“It doesn’t feel like it can end.”
(Reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Dan Peleschuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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