Her niece, Margarita, looked up at her. “When will we go to town and get Mommy?” she asked. Ms. Sorochan had been looking after the girl for her sister, who lives in another town that the family had viewed as more dangerous.
The Sorochans, awoken by a siren and three explosions, had rushed to the cellar of the building. The daughter-in-law of their neighbor was killed, as were the parents of one of Ms. Sorochan’s friends. “We are afraid to stay here any longer,” said her father, Viktor Sorochan.
Another couple, Vyacheslav and Iryna Odaynik, approached. Do you live here? “We used to live here,” Mr. Odaynik said. They had left with their two children for Moldova in March. But the children were not happy and every now and again they would return for a weekend. “We were here a week ago and everything was peaceful,” he said.
Now they were back again to assess the damage in their seventh-floor apartment, but had not yet been allowed in. Mr. Odaynik gazed up at it.
Mr. Sorochan said, “Putin wants to capture Ukraine, all of it.”
More than four months into the war, most Ukrainians seem to see no end to it, even as they express an ironclad conviction that victory will be theirs. Families are scattered. Nowhere seems entirely safe, not even a small summer resort at the southwestern corner of Ukraine, far from the war of attrition in the Donbas. The weapons Ukraine has are insufficient for a broad counterattack, although driving the Russians from Snake Island illustrates the depth of the country’s resistance.
“We need more support from the West, and we urge our allies to speed up shipments of weapons that are desperately needed,” said Mr. Yenin, the deputy minister. “These are critical weeks of the war.” He added that the Russian rockets “were fired from the Black Sea.”
