Latest news with #Lyudmila
Egypt Independent
2 days ago
- Politics
- Egypt Independent
Massive Russian drone attack slams Kyiv and hits maternity hospital in Odesa, Ukrainian officials say
Kyiv CNN — Russia launched 315 drones at Ukraine overnight into Tuesday, in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said was 'one of the largest' attacks on the capital Kyiv, as officials said a maternity ward in the southern port city of Odesa had been hit. Seven districts of the capital were damaged by the Russian attacks, which burned high-rise buildings, homes, cars and warehouses, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv city military administration, who said it was a 'tough night for all of us.' Russian drone strikes wounded four people, according to Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko. 'Today was one of the largest attacks on Kyiv,' Zelensky wrote on X. 'Russian missile and Shahed strikes drown out the efforts of the United States and others around the world to force Russia into peace.' Air raid sirens blared for hours and Kyiv residents heard regular explosions through the night, and air defense systems have been working non-stop in the city center, a CNN producer said. At least two men were killed and nine wounded in the strikes on Odesa, according to a Telegram post from the region's Prosecutor's Office. Earlier, a Russian attack struck a maternity ward, according to according to Andriy Yermak, Chief of Presidential Staff. A firefighter works at the site of a Russian drone strike in Kyiv, Ukraine on June 10, 2025. Thomas Peter/Reuters Video footage from Reuters showed a woman in hospital scrubs sweeping shards of broken glass from the maternity ward that was struck. A 78-year-old Odesa resident, Violetta, who preferred to be identified by her first name only due to security concerns, told CNN it was 'a terrible night.' 'My garage with my car is destroyed… We've had a terrible time. Thank God I'm not hurt. I heard the siren in time and ran into the hallway to hide. It was just in time, because the roof of my apartment collapsed,' she said, standing next to her car covered by piles of rubble. 'I heard other explosions in Odesa, but nothing compares to this, it's so close. My neighbor, a boy, was wounded, his shoulder was cut by glass, and last night they took him to get stitches. Lyudmila, 60, described the frightening loud bangs and scenes of glass and plaster flying everywhere when the drones hit. 'It's very scary because it's close by. Drones were flying around all the time, banging and banging. It was very scary, but in four years this is the first time we've been hit. It's very hard mentally,' said Lyudmila, who also preferred to only use her first name. Russia also launched two KN-23 ballistic missiles and five Iskander-K cruise missiles in the overnight attack, Ukraine's Air Force said. The overnight attacks follow Russia's biggest drone strike on Ukraine on Monday, where Russia fired 479 UAVs in an overnight aerial assault, surpassing the highest number of drones Moscow has launched in a single day for the second consecutive weekend. This story has been updated with the latest developments.
Daily Mail
04-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Gruesome mystery of seven 'zombie' hikers who started frothing at the mouth and bashing heads on rocks before dying one-by-one after winter storm up 8,000ft mountain... with one terrified survivor witnessing it all
Valentina Utochenko's life changed forever when she heard the bloodcurdling scream from the back of her hiking group. Fear and adrenaline rushed through the then-21-year-old's body as she stood, frozen to the spot, and watched blood pour from her friend's eyes and ears. To her horror, Alexander Krysin fell to the floor in a fit, writhing around in the crisp mountain snow for a minute before going limp. One by one, the rest of her seven-person group began doing the same. She could do nothing but witness the tragedy in terror. Valentina, 17, along with 24-year-old Tatyana Filipenko, 23-year-old Alexander Krysin, 19-year-old Denis Shvachkin, 17-year-old Viktoriya 'Vika' Zalesova, 16-year-old Timur Bapanov, were being lead through Russia's Khamar-Daban mountain range for a hike by Lyudmila Korovina. What she thought would be a bracing jaunt through the scenic mountains of Russia ended up becoming the defining and most traumatising chapter of her life. The seven Kazakh youngsters had arrived to the remote Russian region of Irkutsk just a week before the tragedy unfolded in August 1993. Their aim was to journey across the Khamar-Daban mountain range. Valentina said in an interview after the deadly incident that the group were well-prepared for their journey. She told Russia 1: 'We had gone on hikes before. We had never had any life-threatening situations. 'Everything was thought out down to the smallest detail: from shoes to underwear.' After setting off from the small town of Murino, which sits on Lake Baikal, on August 2 that year, they planned to traipse up the Langutai river before passing through the Langutai Gates pass. Then, they were set to cross to another river, the Barun-Yunkatsuk river, before beginning a long march up the Khanulu mountain and along its ridge. Their arduous journey would've ended in the city of Slyudyanka, on the plateau of the Anigta and Baiga rivers. In total, their route would've taken them though roughly 70 miles of dense forests and snowcapped mountains. And they were meant to meet up with another group, led by Lyudmila's daughter Natalia. Though the first two days of the hike led by Lyudmila went well, making good time up the Retranslyator peak through sun and clear skies that made their journey relatively easy. But the group was suddenly subjected to an unexpected rainstorm. This freak weather event soaked their bags and equipment through, forcig the team to change tack, and they decided to make camp. But despite being an experienced hiker, Lyudmila set her group up at an exposed location, drastically increasing the challenge of surviving. Valentina wrote in a statement to investigators: 'We stopped at a height without a forest, pitched two tents. At 4am, the tent guy lines broke. We fixed them. At 6am, the stake was torn out. The sleeping bags were wet.' Unable to build a fire that night, the team hunkered down in miserable weather, before finally being able to get a blaze going in the early hours of the morning of August 5. After cooking breakfast and eating together, they started to carry on down their path. But at 10am that day, Valentina's life changed forever. At an altitude of 2,396m (7,861ft), Krysin let out a harrowing screech from the back of the group. The others quickly turned around, and to their horror they saw he was bleeding from his eyes and ears, and was frothing from his mouth. After several seconds of this, he collapsed and convulsed violently for a few seconds before going still. Lyudmila, terrified that one of her group had suddenly and violently collapsed under her watch, ran over to check on him. Seconds after going to him and trying to wake him up, she too began screaming before bleeding from her own ears and eyes and foaming at the mouth, before going limp and collapsing on top of him. Filipenko was the next to collapse, though her symptoms were far more terrifying. She began to claw at her own throat, as if she were choking. According to Valentina's account of the tragedy, she then crawled to a nearby rock and bashed her head into it over and over against until she was lifeless. Two others, Zalesova and Bapanov, ran away in a fearful frenzy. But whatever had killed the others quickly got them. Both of them collapsed, threw up blood and clawed and their own throats before tragically dying. Valentina and Shvachkin hurried away, but shortly after Shvachkin also collapsed convulsing. The terrified lone survivor, having watched her friends perish one by one, was left to fend for herself in the harsh, remote mountains. She knew it would take her several days to get to safety, and decided to hunker down for the night to get some rest. She was forced to make the difficult decision to return to the site of her friends' deaths to collect supplies to make her way back to civilisation. 'In the morning, I went up, saw Tanya on the rocks, Denis, Timur, Vika. Higher up – Sasha and Korovina,' Valya said. In a poignant act of humanity, she made sure to close all their eyes before trekking back. For four long days, she used her dead friends' supplies to survive as she followed power lines back down the mountains in the hopes that someone would find her. After finding a nearby river, she began following it to its mouth, before being found by a group of Ukrainian kayakers. 'When I remember this picture, my heart sinks. There was a girl standing on the shore, screaming and waving her arms,' said Alexander Kvitnitsky, a kayaker from Kyiv who found her. 'When we got to the shore, she rushed to one of our participants and cried for a long time on her chest. She was incoherently telling us that people had died and that she was scared.' He and his group took her to the closest police station to file a report on her friends' tragic ends. It took her several days to even croak out the necessary information for police to begin their investigation. It was another two weeks before local cops began investigating the tragedy, and a further two days for them to find the bodies using helicopters. When they were found, the corpses were partially undressed, exposed to the elements. 'It was a terrible picture. The guys were lying on a small ledge, some pressed close to each other, some a little further away,' Yuri Golius, in charge of the search, told journalists at the time. 'No eyes. Worms were crawling in the empty eye sockets and slightly open mouths.' After they were taken back, all the dead hikers were found to have signs of bruised lungs and a protein deficiency. A coroner concluded that almost everyone died of hypothermia, except for Lyudmila - she was found to have died of a heart attack. In the wake of their terrifying, unexplained deaths, many began to speculate as to how they died, with theories ranging from simple medical maladies to nerve agent poisoning. One of the first explanations for their deaths was hypothermia, which they may have suffered after not properly sheltering on the night of the storm. In extreme cases of hypothermia, sufferers often undergo vivid hallucinations. People also undergo what is known as paradoxical undressing, which is when sufferers of hypothermia feel a sudden need to take their clothes off despite being in biting cold conditions, which perhaps explains why the bodies were found partially undressed. But Valery Tatarnikov and Vladimir Zinov, two rescuers who took part in the search operation for the bodies, claimed that it was impossible for the hikers to die of cold. Zinov instead suggested the group died of altitude sickness. Vladimir Borzenkov, a tourist in the area, and Nikolai Fedorov, a man who was also part of the search operation, suggested that the hikers went mad due to infrasounds that constantly played in their ears. 'Individual rocks under a strong wind can become an infrasound generator of enormous power, which causes a state of panic and unaccountable horror in a person,' Fedorov said. 'According to the girl who survived, her friends behaved restlessly, their speech was incoherent.' Yuri Golius, the leader of the search operation, publicly blamed Korovina for being negligent. He said that her inaction led the group to suffer from a vitamin deficiency. But in a 2018 interview for a Russian magazine, Valentina denied this, instead revealing that it was her belief that the group died after each suffering a pulmonary oedema. One theory claimed that the group may have been killed by a nerve agent. The deadly nerve agency Novichok was tested in the region. The gas-based poison could've been left by Russian scientists, and often takes months to dissipate. But for Valentina, the answer to the question of how exactly her friends died is entirely irrelevant. It was, and will forever be, a 'nightmare', and figuring out the cause of their deaths is a fruitless endeavour. 'What's the point? It's all useless,' she said. 'You can't get them back.'
BBC News
31-01-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Ukraine's missing people - how the disappearances erode morale
The Russians came for Tetiana and Oleh Plachkov while they were sleeping, bursting into their home late at was 25 September 2023 in Melitopol, south-eastern Ukraine, where the couple had grown up, fallen in love and been married. Now their city was occupied by Russian men were armed and dressed in black. As some began searching the house, seizing devices and documents, others led Tetiana and Oleh away in couple then vanished without has listed more than 61,000 people as missing since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, both soldiers and civilians. When troops go missing in action there is a chance they might eventually be included in a prisoner-of-war exchange. But civilians are returned very rarely: the Russians don't usually admit to holding them. Four months after she was detained, Tetiana was abandoned at a hospital in Melitopol in a coma. She had no clothes or medical papers and the soldiers who brought her left no explanation. She died without ever regaining has never been found."It's so hard for me to think about what they did to her, and why. My mum was 51. She loved life. She was such a radiant person, then everything was cut short," the couple's only daughter, Lyudmila, cries quietly."If, God forbid, something has happened to my father it will kill me." Punishment, fear and patrolling soldiers Lyudmila's phone is full of happy memories of her parents. She showed them to me on a recent visit to Ukraine, where she'd travelled to wind up the family restaurant business and give a DNA sample that might identify her father if a body is ever not something Lyudmila wants to family were extremely close. Every day under Russian occupation, her parents would send reassuring video messages. "Morning, daughter! Just checking in," Tetiana announces in one video, then swings the camera round to her husband who waves and grins in his dressing are pictures from life before the war, too: laughing on a beach, dancing at a disco. The couple are full of energy and life. When Russian tanks rolled into their city in early 2022, the Plachkovs decided to stay. The entire country was under attack in an invasion that Vladimir Putin had threatened, but most could not imagine until the first those first weeks, Lyudmila joined the crowds waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags and shouting at the soldiers to leave. Then the round-up Putin's Russia, fear is a way of rule: dissent is crushed and critics imprisoned. The aim is to punish the few and scare the rest into compliance. Now the same principle was being imported to the swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine illegally claimed by Russia, with soldiers patrolling the those considered loyal to Kyiv were seen as traitors. Tetiana and the 'waiters' of Ukraine After a few months in that climate, Lyudmila fled abroad as a refugee. But her mother didn't want to leave her city, her own parents or the business she and Oleh had built up. She also had faith in the Ukrainian late 2023, all the talk was of a counteroffensive in the southeast to take territory back from Russia and Tetiana believed Melitopol would be liberated."She was a strong optimist," Lyudmila smiles. "I'd say, 'mum, maybe you should leave.' And she'd say, 'Just a little more time. Our guys will push harder.'"Earlier that year, Tetiana's name had appeared online on a pro-Russian forum. It identified her as a 'waiter', a slur for those seen to be 'waiting' for liberation. Melitopol was full of informers."She definitely donated money and helped [Ukraine] however she could," her daughter tells me. "Some people die on the battlefield and others die in occupation, helping Ukraine in other ways. To me, she's a warrior. She knew the risks. But she had to help."By then, Ukrainians in occupied areas were being forced to take Russian passports. Russian citizens were brought in to staff schools, as well as police and Tetiana and Oleh agreed to leave Melitopol if the Ukrainian army hadn't pushed through by November. But in September, they were arrested. What became of the disappeared Lyudmila was frantic. Unable to return to an occupied town, she wrote to every official body she could find, demanding answers as her grandmother began searching local police stations and in February 2024, came a call: Tetiana was critically ill, and Lyudmila's gran could visit her in hospital – once she'd been questioned by the FSB security service. That's how the family learned Tetiana was being investigated for by that point she was unconscious. A nurse later told Lyudmila her mother had arrived in hospital with severe bedsores, suggesting she had been immobile for some time. So where had she been and what happened to her?Through sheer persistence, Lyudmila has gathered a thick file of documents on her parents' disappearance but she says that none of the printed words make sense. They claim Tetiana had been passing information about Russian military personnel to Ukrainian intelligence, but the criminal case was only opened after she was brought to that, the papers record that "unknown persons in military uniform" had taken her and Oleh in an "unknown direction" in September 2023. Their whereabouts from then on is officially a mystery. But in Russia it is the FSB that handles espionage cases, including detention and interrogation, and it was Russian FSB officers who searched Tetiana and Oleh's home."I'd like to believe her health deteriorated because of the poor conditions and lack of proper care, but deep down I understand that they tortured her," Lyudmila view is formed from first-hand accounts of brutality in occupied territory, including from a restaurant singer charged in the same espionage case as Tetiana."They were probably extracting information," Lyudmila says. "I know they like to use electric shock."The autopsy and a hospital report she obtained show that Tetiana died of pneumonia after a prolonged time on a ventilator. But why she was intubated initially isn't recorded. Neither is what happened to Lyudmila's father, Oleh."He is not on the lists of those detained, there is no criminal case against him," a letter from the Russian Interior Ministry reads. Police have opened a criminal case for abduction but there are no suspects and no clues. Thousands of other missing people Lyudmila's suffering is shared by many thousands of Ukrainian families. At a hotline in Kyiv run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), most of the calls are from people searching for relatives lost in this phone operators gather detailed information, often in long and emotional calls, which they then send to a tracing database in has logged her own details here and elsewhere, but so far there have been no answers."There are always limits to what we're able to do, and we have to be very realistic with families to manage their expectations. There's a lot of pain and frustration," ICRC spokesman Patrick Griffiths is also countering criticism in Ukraine that the organisation doesn't push Russia hard enough. International humanitarian law obliges all states to report every detainee during an armed conflict, and provide access, but Russia simply ignores that. It's partly because it sees all civilians in occupied areas as Russian and nobody else's business. It's also a display of contempt for the rest of the world's ICRC does have staff in Moscow and parts of occupied Ukraine, but whilst handing out aid is allowed, occasionally, touring Melitopol to search for secret prisons is not."There are a lot of families who… may never receive the answer they're looking for," Mr Griffiths cautions, adding that the ICRC can't "force its way in" anywhere. "But the process of dialogue with the authorities, trying to improve our access, never stops."Ukraine's own national search squad has even less access. The Office for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances amounts to just three police officers, based at the end of an Interior Ministry corridor in Kyiv. But their powerful facial recognition software can scan websites and media, hunting for an ever-growing list of the bloggers sometimes post videos of detainees, or the dead. But a search for Lyudmila's father draws a blank."Either he's being held hostage and can't contact relatives," commissioner Artur Hnatovych explains before voicing the other alternative. "Sometimes, the bodies of civilians are returned to us along with our deceased soldiers. They are mostly in a very poor condition, so visual recognition is impossible."That's why Lyudmila gave a DNA sample. Morale and the knock-on effect In occupied areas, the abductions have slowed as the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, but they haven't interior ministry recorded more than 1,000 new missing people last month but these days many of that number will be the whole, Russia's methods seem brutally effective: the staunchest supporters of Kyiv have either left occupied land, or keep their heads down and mouths shut. In some cases, Ukrainians who once fled such towns are now returning to live under Russian rule. For some, it's better than being a that's why I've heard some Ukrainians wonder out loud lately whether such land is still worth fighting the frontline barely shifting, certainly not in Kyiv's favour, and soldiers dying each day, the country is starting to ask some very tough questions: about this war, the endgame and the immense costs. The missing returned: 'I was in hell' In her own personal battle, Lyudmila still manages to find some cause for hope. Because sometimes the missing do 2023, Leonid Popov was detained in Melitopol, just like Lyudmila's parentsHe'd taken a photograph of Russian military hardware, was chased down the street by soldiers then months later his father got a call: Leonid had been left at a city hospital, exhausted and severely photographs his mother Anna has shared from that day are shocking: the young man's ribs are clearly visible beneath his skin."He told me that he'd been in awful conditions," Anna remembers talking to Leonid that day."He said, 'mum, in a word, I was in hell.'" Over the months, Leonid had been held and interrogated in multiple locations. "They were given plastic plates of buckwheat and a glass of water for about 20 people. When they said they were hungry, they were told to shut up or they'd be shot."His parents began making plans to get him out of Melitopol to safety. But as soon as he was discharged, he was detained immediately and disappeared all over Lyudmila's father, Leonid was officially listed as missing even though he'd been taken away by was another whole year before his parents were told he was in pre-trial detention in Donetsk, another occupied city, and charged with espionage. Initially overjoyed to find him, they now worry about his health: Leonid has paranoid schizophrenia, managed with medication."They do not understand that for a person with such a diagnosis, it's already deadly just to be in prison without his pills," Anna worries. She has begun writing to Russian officials, pleading for Leonid to be included on a prisoner exchange list, on humanitarian grounds. The Trump effect "No one could have foreseen this nightmare," says Lyudmila. "Even now, as I talk about it, I can't believe it's real."She hasn't chosen a photo for her mother's grave, as if she's stalling her grieving until she can find her father. But she's run out of places to now Donald Trump is back in the White House, with talk of negotiations to end the war. That won't be quick or easy, if it happens at all, but it could force Ukraine to relinquish occupied areas like Melitopol to Russia. "Maybe they'll release the civilians if they think they've won?" Lyudmila tries to look on the bright side. "Or maybe it will get worse: a dead end.""Either way, accepting that this land is no longer Ukraine would be very hard."It is the land her parents defended and where they were happy and where, even now, Lyudmila believes Oleh could be held in a cold basement or a prison cell, still waiting to be found."I couldn't save my mum, even though I tried so hard," she says. "Now I need to save my dad."Production by Paul Pradier, Xavier Vanpevenaege and Svitlana LibetTop picture credit: BBCByline image picture credit: Jonathan Ford BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
