Sadness pervades these days Hospital Number Three in Kremenchuk.
Here, Yulia Brovko recovers from her injuries.
She is one of 59 hospitalized — half in critical condition — for Monday's Russian attack on the Amstor shopping mall.
“My whole body hurts”, she manages to say with a smile that will not be erased from her face during the entire conversation.
When it all happened, she was working in a mobile accessories store.
She remembers nothing of the horror.
In her head she went from selling normally to suddenly seeing herself on the street.
The worst thing is not her situation, which is not too serious, but the number of co-workers and friends of whom she knows nothing, and of whom she fears the worst.
“But now I can't think about that”, she replies with her body full of long Betadine lines,
Like Brovko, many in Kremenchuk prefer not to think about the 21 people who remain unaccounted for.
Some keep calling the phone of their relatives or friends in the hope that a miracle will happen.
But a walk around the grounds of what until recently was a shopping center like so many others is enough to convince yourself that it is impossible to find anything resembling a life.
The burning smell gradually dissipates.
In one corner you can see some charred jars from a place that could have been a perfumery.
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The Ukrainian government no longer has any doubts.
Interior Minister Denis Monastirski has ruled out the possibility of finding any missing persons alive.
So everything indicates that, when the complicated rescue tasks are finished, the list of dead will be around quarantine.
Although the official death toll remains at 18, advisers to President Volodymyr Zelensky say it has reached twenty.
Those responsible for the rescue tasks have found eight fragments of bodies, although in such a sorry state that they cannot be recognized or know how many people they belong to.
For this, we will have to wait for DNA tests.
Social networks are these days a reminder of the tragedy.
“We are looking for Yurii Mikitenko.
His wife Anna and his son are waiting for him.
He does not answer.
I hope someone finds him alive."
Konstantin Vosni.
He was working at the Amstor mall.
He has a tattoo on his hand.”
These are some messages that desperate relatives posted on Instagram on Monday and on the Kremenchurk city channel on Telegram, the network that many Ukrainians use as a means of information.
There are few answers.
Yulia Sischenko is one of the doctors who care for patients who have lived through the hell of Amstor.
With 22 years of professional experience, she answers without hesitation that this is the most horrible thing she has ever experienced.
“I was trying to get my work done as fast as possible because I couldn't stand it,” she confesses.
Four or five patients accumulate in each room of the hospital, an aged infrastructure in which there are not too many hands.
Dr. Sischenko talks about exhausting work days, being forced, she and her team, to face a crisis for which no one had prepared them.
Because nobody, ever, can be prepared for something like that.
Yulia Sischenko, a doctor at Hospital Number Three in Kremenchuk, this Wednesday.Luis Doncel
A baby cart sums up the horror that Natalia experienced, according to the Kremenchuk Instagram account, which has more than 80,000 subscribers in a city that had about 220,000 inhabitants before the war.
An alarm sounded first, and this optometrist left the store for safety.
But nothing happened and she went back to her position.
She started attending to a pregnant woman who was with her husband and her baby when a second alarm sounded again.
Natalia, already used to these notices, which are constantly heard around here these days, preferred to continue with work.
And that's when the Russian missile forever changed this mid-sized industrial city where someone used to complain that nothing ever happened.
In the midst of the chaos, he only remembers a blinding light and a very loud noise.
Afterwards, everything went dark and the water began to flood the ground.
Full of injuries caused by the broken glass, she felt pieces of the ceiling, lamps and air conditioners falling on her.
Suddenly, she saw the cart of which she had been her last customer.
She didn't dare to look if the baby was still inside or not.
He lost track of time.
She only remembers the relief she felt when, a long time later, she saw her client's husband with the baby in his arms safe and sound.
A while of conversation has passed and the patient Yulia begins to show symptoms of pain.
The doctor suggests that it is better to let her rest.
She says that she hopes they won't take too long to discharge her.
As she slowly recovers, Russia continues to deny both her involvement in the attack and that the mall was filled with peaceful citizens on Monday afternoon.
President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that it was not an act of terrorism.
“The Russian army does not attack civilian targets.
There is no need for it.
We have every chance to decide on targets, something we achieved with modern, high-precision, long-range weapons,” the Kremlin chief was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Ria Novosti.
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