His mother, Julia Nesterenko, happily encouraged the habit. “We even had a basketball hoop at home,” the 33-year-old told CNN while describing her first family home. It’s her “nest,” she said, with a small garden and a vegetable patch.
It was time “to get out of the occupied territories to safety … to survive,” Julia said. Russians had taken over their village of Verkhnii Rohachyk and the Nesterenko family feared the consequences.
With nothing more than a backpack and their important documents, the family took what seemed the easiest route to the Ukrainian-held territories, she said. On April 7, the family of three and 11 others boarded an evacuation boat operated by a local resident and crossed the Dnipro River from the southern, Russian-held part of the Kherson region to Ukrainian-controlled territory on the other side of the river river . One of Europe’s longest waterways, the Dnipro River cuts through Ukraine and its Kherson region before emptying into the Black Sea.
The boat crossing, which started from the shore of the fishing village of Pervomaivka, should have been easy. According to Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the military administration of Kryvyi Rih, in the neighboring Dnepropetrovsk region, it was the seventh evacuation trip by boat from the village to a Ukrainian-held area on the north bank of the Dnipro River since the beginning of the war.
Instead, according to Julia, two other survivors, a victim’s friend and several regional officials, it turned into a bloodbath. They described how Russian missiles and gunfire were aimed at the boat after it accidentally drifted into the front line.
Roman Shelest, head of the prosecutor’s office of eastern Kryvyi Rih district for Ukraine, told CNN that the boat drifted into the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces and was fired upon 70 meters from shore.
A survivor, who declined to be named for safety reasons, explained that the boat got lost in a smoke screen believed to have been created by the Russians. CNN has not been able to independently verify this claim.
“This shot was performed using a multiple rocket launch system, possibly Grad, but we would not be able to determine the exact weapon type until after (the) forensic (examination) is complete,” Shelest added.
One of the survivors also said he believed they were hit by Russian Grad rockets.
When the boat’s navigator indicated the group had drifted near the Russian-held village of Osokorivka, the stillness of the morning was soon broken by the sound of exploding missiles, survivors said.
Bleeding, Vladimir sank into Julia’s arms. “My husband behind me also fell on me when he was shot in the head,” Julia told CNN, her voice soft and monotonous, seemingly devoid of emotion after all she’d lost on this trip.
Four people were killed in the attack that day. Oleh was one of three who died on the boat; Vladimir died in a hospital shortly after. Another victim was a lawyer who traveled to the Kherson region to rescue her son and provide humanitarian assistance, the lawyer’s friend Tatyana Denisenko told CNN.
Photos of the aftermath of the attack showed what appeared to be the remains of a missile on the shore and bullet holes and shrapnel holes in the hull of the boat.
“From the shells and ammunition we saw in the area and on the coast, we could tell the direction of the shot – showing that (they) came from the south, and that is the area occupied at the time and under control.” about the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” prosecutor Shelest, who is investigating the attack, told CNN.
CNN has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment. Since the war broke out, Russia has repeatedly denied attacking civilians – a claim that has been belied by attacks on civilians and civilian targets confirmed by CNN and other news organizations.
Kherson in crisis
The Nesterenko family is just one of many in Ukraine whose lives have been uprooted or destroyed by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the country. According to the United Nations, more than 7.1 million people are internally displaced in the country, with nearly two-thirds of Ukraine’s children having fled their homes in the past six weeks. At least 191 children have been killed and more than 349 injured since the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on Wednesday.
Cherson was one of the first cities conquered by the Russians. Mayor Ihor Kolykhayev said people were “actively” leaving Kherson and other cities in the largely Russian-held southern region after atrocities erupted in the Kyiv region after the Kremlin hastily withdrew from northern Ukraine.
“Cities are getting empty,” he said Tuesday, as Russia refocused its offensive on eastern Ukraine. “It hurts me a lot when people leave Kherson. (By) leaving their homes, people will never return home,” he said.
There are growing rumors that a referendum is to be held in the Russian-controlled areas of Kherson, particularly in areas on the left bank of the Dnipro River, to legitimize illegal Russian land grabs. A similar tactic played out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, where pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk held referendums on the formation of “people’s republics,” with the vote being dismissed as a sham by Ukraine and Western countries.
Ukrainians living on the left bank of the region peacefully resisted Russian occupation with rallies in Kherson and Kolykhayev, the mayor said on Tuesday. At an earlier rally in Kherson, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of shooting at unarmed people. “Russian soldiers don’t even know what it’s like to be free,” Oleh Baturin, a reporter for local newspaper Novyi Den who recently left the region, told CNN.
On Kherson’s right bank of the Dnieper, Baturin describes a “tragic situation” that reflects the destruction wrought in the capital’s Kyiv region. People living in villages bordering the front lines in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions told him they had been robbed, beaten and threatened by Russian forces, he said.
“For example, the Kochubeivka, the Novovorontsovka (where Osokorivka is located) and the Vysokopillia settlements — there are villages that died out in the first half of March and were completely looted and destroyed,” he said.
Baturin predicted that only when the Russians pulled out would the full horror of the occupation come to light.
broken lives
Three survivors described the trauma of the boat attack in interviews with CNN last week.
“It was so sudden that everyone was in shock,” said one of the survivors, speaking to CNN. As the missiles hit the area, fragments began hitting the passengers, he said.
The survivor said he was spared injuries because he fell from the boat in the first moments of the bombardment. “I was wearing boots that were so heavy that I was immediately dragged to the bottom (of the river). Then we heard[missiles]pour in,” he said.
They had gotten into an active front line hugging the north coast around the village of Osokorivka. Ukrainian soldiers started shouting from the banks of the river, threw their guns on the ground and waded into the water to rescue the boat and civilians, the survivor said. It took up to 15 minutes to retrieve them from the water around the Novovorontsovka area. CNN geolocated images of the aftermath along that coast.
“Our guys (Ukrainian military) helped, of course…they rushed into the water and swam to the boat,” the survivor said as he pulled the boat to shore.
Julia said the shock of the moment and the trauma that followed meant her memory of the event was blurry. “I don’t know why we were shot at. We didn’t understand the sounds: bullets, shelling, explosions?” She said. “And I didn’t understand what happened — I was just in the fog.”
She recalls that soldiers carried her husband’s body and “brought it to the beach.” Her son Vladimir was alive but badly injured. “He was breathing, he had a serious head injury (and) was losing a lot of blood. We took him 40 kilometers to the nearest hospital,” she said. “He’s had surgery. There was still hope that they could save him. But as the doctors later said, ‘It was an injury incompatible with life.’
Maxim Kolomiyets, a burly 37-year-old craftsman, took the boat to leave the region and join the Ukrainian army. He was knocked unconscious in the first moments of the shelling and woke up hours later in a hospital with a shrapnel wound in his left arm.
A day after the attack, on April 8, Lyudmila Denisova, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, wrote in a Facebook post that the shooting at the boat was a “war crime and a crime against humanity.” Speaking to CNN, Vilkul, head of the Kryvyi Rih military administration, explained that the Russians are “doing everything to keep civilians out of the occupied territories. Because they seem afraid that these people will be able to say something about their positions.”
Julia now lives with relatives in a territory controlled by Ukraine, where she buried her son and husband. She is at a loss as to what to do next.
“We wanted this trip to be a chance to escape the occupation… It was like a light at the end of the tunnel for us. Because it was already unbearable for us to be where we were,” she said.
“This war has ruined my family, my life – and the killing of people must stop. Right away. Because it destroys destinies, lives.”
CNN’s Tara John reported and wrote from Lviv. Oleksandr Fylyppov, Sandi Sidhu, Julia Presniakova reported from Lviv. Nathan Hodge, Julia Kesaieva and Olga Voitovych contributed to this piece.