In the aftermath of atrocity, Ukrainians struggle to clean up and carry on

It wasn't necessarily a premonition that kept Vitaliy Zakharchuk awake in the predawn hush of his rented fifth floor flat in Kryvyi Rih. To him, it felt more like a deep-seated, nagging restlessness.

The mine administrator, recently relocated from Kyiv to central Ukraine, woke up at three o'clock Tuesday morning for no apparent reason and couldn't get back to sleep. He couldn't figure out why.

Around the same time, behind a row of thick, old trees in the building directly opposite, Nikita Zakharchenko was also having trouble sleeping in his third floor apartment. The family cat was meowing loudly and insistently — for no apparent reason.

Shortly before half past three, an enormous explosion and a blinding flash of light shattered the early morning stillness. It was followed in rapid succession by other explosions that were later attributed to punctured car fuel tanks rupturing in front of the building.

The balcony and kitchen windows of Zakharchuk's studio apartment blew right off their frames — one came crashing down on him in his bed. Once he realized that, apart from a few bumps and scratches, he was mostly unhurt, Zakharchuk heard the cries of his next-door neighbour, a young woman in her 20s.

The blast broke his clock. It stopped precisely at 3:28 am.

"I feel like an angel was flying over me. I feel very lucky," said Zakharchuk, 68.

That "angel" probably was mother nature. A line of old trees separated his building from the site of the blast, creating a thick screen that likely absorbed some of the shockwave.

Across a burning parking lot and an adjacent child's playground, Zakharchenko, 23, was scrambling out of bed with his 22-year-old wife.

Barefoot and stepping on broken glass, he bundled her and their one-year-old son and fled the smoke-filled apartment.

"I woke up with the first explosion [but] there were others as I carried my kid out," he said.

Both of his feet suffered mild cuts. Later, as he sat in the back of an ambulance being treated by paramedics, he said he didn't remember precisely when he was injured. His wife ended up with cuts on her face; their son was unharmed.

The Russian missile that exploded on the ground in front of Zakharchenko's building, and the fires that followed, killed 11 of his neighbours. Two of them were friends — a young couple around the same age as he and his wife whose first floor apartment was directly in front of the blast.

"They were very nice people," Zakharchenko said.