The independent Kazakh publication "Respublika" released a series of reports devoted to the true history of the war in Ukraine. This view "from abroad" on the events seemed interesting to us, so "ElitExpert" decided to introduce it with these publications our readers.
Zatoka, Lebedivka, Sergiyivka, Sanzheyka - these small resort villages, which are located near Odessa on the Black Sea coast, were a popular destination for domestic tourism until 2022. Odessa's mild climate, warm sea and kilometers of sandy beaches have been attracting tourists from all over the country and abroad for decades.
For the owners of housing in these villages, such a situation has become a real gold bottom - according to statistics, up to a million people vacation in Zatoka and its surroundings every year. Therefore, in the "high season" everything is available there - attics, small rooms in barns, even thatched huts, with grandmothers-hostesses in addition. However, this is a budget option. For tourists, over the last 10-15 years, modern high-rise hotels, villas, recreation centers and private sanatoriums have appeared on the coast.
In the mass consciousness of Ukrainians, these places have always been associated only with summer vacations - something like the shores of Lake Alakol or the shores of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan, so it was a shock for the entire country when the names of resort villages began to appear in the summary of hostilities. Since the beginning of the war, the entire coast of the Odesa region has been constantly shelled by Russia, and where children's laughter rang out for years, now rockets fly in almost every day.
A terrible night
In an ordinary nine-story Soviet panel building, which can be found everywhere in Kazakhstan, on the evening of Thursday, June 30, people went to bed, put their children to sleep, wished them good night, and put pillows under their heads. Three hundred meters away from them, the guests of the "Goji" recreation center, located right on the seashore, were already sleeping.
Not everyone was able to wake up. Late at night, at the beginning of three in the morning, three Tu-22MZ aircraft of the Russian Air Force, while in the airspace of Crimea, fired three Kh-22 missiles along the Odesa coast.
The first of these rockets hit a nine-story building with sleeping people. The rocket hit the basement floor and killed all the residents of the third entrance from the first to the fifth floor. Of the 106 apartments in the building, 105 were destroyed or damaged. Then the fire from the apartment building spread to the attached store, which also burned to the ground.
Two other rockets a few minutes apart hit the resort, killing its guests. In all other houses in a radius of up to two kilometers from the place of impact, the windows were blown out by the devastating blast wave.
The video of the consequences of the airstrikes on Serhiyivka was published on the website of Radio Liberty. Ukraine".
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When the Russian rocket hit the nearby recreation center, a family was sleeping in one of the rooms: Andriy and Nadiya Rudnytskyi. Their 11-year-old son Dima was staying in another room with his friend.
Andriy worked as an administrator of this recreation center and brought his family there the day before the tragedy.
"When the first explosion rang out, my wife and I ran to look for our son. He and his friend slept in another room, on the second floor. We grabbed the children and ran to the exit, debris was falling all around. And when we went down the stairs, the door to the street was already visible, a new explosion rang out - it was another rocket. I fainted, and when I came to, I saw that my wife had been crushed by a concrete slab. She was no longer breathing. The son was not visible under the debris. I called him, but he didn't answer, and I realized that my family is gone."
The bodies of Dmytro Rudnytskyi, a student of the seventh grade of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky Academic Lyceum, and his mother, Nadia, were retrieved from the rubble only a few hours later by rescuers.
Andriy himself was seriously injured and spent several months in the hospital with broken bones.
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Oleksandr Shyshkov, a well-known children's football coach in Odesa, who came to Serhiyivka for the training of his Atletik team, was another victim at the recreation center.
The mentor and functionary did a lot for football in the Odesa region, and for the past five years FC "Atletik" students have spent several weeks in Serhiivka every summer. The children trained hard and participated in tournaments, went to the sea and had fun in the evenings.
Already on July 2, another children's football tournament was to be held there, so Oleksandr arrived a day earlier than his wards to resolve organizational issues.
"It can be called a real miracle that the children were waiting at the base on the afternoon of July 1, and not on June 30, as originally planned," said colleagues of the deceased coach. "Can you imagine what would have happened if dozens of small children were there at the time of the rocket's arrival?"
"For six years, you instilled in our children a love for football, human values, honor, respect, humanity, decency. Thanks to you, Oleksandr Shishkov, my son played and fell in love with football, you created our big football family. It is impossible to convey the pain of loss," wrote the mother of one of Oleksandr Svitlan's students on the dead coach's page.
He was married, with two minor children left without a father.
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A group of students, including 19-year-old Victoria from Odesa, came to the coast to relax and celebrate the end of the school year. Friends rented an apartment for three days on the first floor of an ill-fated building in Serhiivka. The sea is close at hand, and the price is an order of magnitude lower than at the recreation centers.
At the same time, the girl says that they specifically went to a safe place - away from cities with military units and military facilities.
When a rocket hit the house, the young people were awake. Out of seven people, five were seriously injured and were hospitalized. Fortunately, no one died.
Their neighbors on the floor were less fortunate. A family of four was sleeping peacefully when the rocket hit the house. The parents died instantly in their beds, the children - two brothers, were seriously injured, but still managed to survive.
The younger brother, 8-year-old Yasha, was particularly badly affected: serious brain damage, impaired cerebral blood flow, coma... Oxygen starvation caused a stroke. As a result, Yakov became paralyzed on the left side of his body. His life was saved first in Odesa, then in Lviv, and now he was transported to Austria.
The eldest child, 13-year-old Volodya, only woke up on the fourth day. He did not dare to tell him about the death of his parents for a long time, so the biggest loss for him in the early days was the death of his pet cat. Seeing how the child was killed by the cat, the doctors did not have the courage to tell him about the death of the closest people.
In total, 22 people, adults and children, were killed that day, and about forty were injured, including a pregnant girl and a six-month-old baby.
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However, the rockets were not limited to Serhiyivka. Neighboring resort towns are also seriously affected, in particular Zatoka, on the territory of which there is a railway and road bridge built over the sea.
This bridge has an important infrastructural value for connecting Odessa with the south of the region, so since the first days of the war, Russian shells have been trying to destroy it. However, most of the rockets hit residential buildings and recreation centers, killing civilians.
The video below shows the consequences of one of the strikes on Zatoka.
Little girl Sasha was only five years old. She loved to draw, sing, and recently loved to dance and go to gymnastics. She is five years old and has only one leg.
The girl and her parents came to visit her grandfather in Zatoka. The family wanted to get away from the constant sirens and have a little rest. But a few minutes after they arrived, a rocket hit a nearby building.
"I WAS PLAYING IN THE STREET, RUNNING, AND I DON'T REMEMBER ANYTHING ELSE," SASHA HERSELF REMEMBERS.
The girl and her mother were crushed by the debris of the building. The mother received multiple shrapnel injuries and partially lost her hearing, and doctors fought for her daughter's life for several weeks.
As a result, the child had to have his leg amputated.
Now the girl faces a difficult and long rehabilitation process - in particular, due to the fact that the girl is growing, it is necessary to change her prosthesis every year.
Now, when her peers dream of new toys, six-year-old Sasha dreams of something completely different: "I want to put on a prosthesis as soon as possible, run and go to gymnastics again."
War crimes
According to experts, the reason for the mass death of people on the Odesa coast is that Russia uses Soviet anti-ship missiles Kh-22, heavy and very destructive, but at the same time completely inaccurate - with a possible deviation from the target up to half a kilometer. That is why residential objects - houses, kindergartens, parks - are the most affected by the use of this type of rockets.
This is what Donatella Rovera, senior crisis advisor of the international human rights organization Amnesty International, says about it:
"This powerful weapon is indiscriminate, it is designed to destroy warships, aircraft carriers, and firing it at residential areas is extremely reckless. This attack is yet another example of the Russian military's complete disregard for the civilian population of Ukraine, which is once again causing death and destruction. All those responsible for such war crimes must answer for their actions before the court."
In Ukraine, the investigation of the crime in Serhiyivka was opened on the basis of "violation of the laws and customs of war, related to intentional murder."
In Russia, the tragedy in Serhiivka was not mentioned at all. In the daily summary of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, they only said that "The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation continue to strike military facilities on the territory of Ukraine with high-precision weapons. The manpower and military equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed in 26 districts."
And only hundreds of wounded and 22 fresh graves in Serhiivka, Odesa, and Zatoka are true witnesses of just one of the countless tragedies of this war. Dreams, plans, the future - everything was taken away from ordinary people by three rockets launched from the waters of the Black Sea in the southern night.
