Hello Everyone,
On March 5, a Russian Su-34 warplane crashed through the roof of Yulia Hrebnveva's two-story home in Chernihiv, Ukraine, where she lived with her husband and children. Hrebnyeva and the children had been in the basement, tidying the space where they had been sleeping every night to avoid the Russian missile attacks. Her husband was outside fixing the lock on the house door, so he was able to pull his family out alive from the basement after the plane struck.
A few blocks away, Vitaliy Serhienko was not so fortunate. The pilot of the downed plane had ejected, landing on Serhienko's roof, and he eventually shot him in the chest.
There was an added element in the equation: The Russian pilot did not have the chance to drop his bombs.
"If these bombs had fallen on Chernihiv, there would be so many more victims," Hrebnyeva said as she surveyed the wreckage still in her yard more than two months after the crash. "Our house stopped it."
Chernihiv, just 40 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, was quickly surrounded at the start of the war, besieged by Russian troops invading from both sides.
The aircraft that crashed on March 5 was among about eight or nine others shot down in a period of several days. From a military standpoint, the destruction of the plane was a sign of Ukraine's success in keeping Russia from gaining air superiority.
0.875 SRY