The Russian attack killed Veronika in her bed on Friday morning, but left her childish chalk drawings of a happy family intact on the wall of their home.
Portraits of “Mama”, “Nika” (her nickname), her uncles, grandparents and even the family cat “Kuzia” – the names written in by an adult – stretch all along the front of the house.
They end only where the plaster was stripped off by an explosion and a fire that took the lives of the three-year-old and her mother, early on Friday morning.
Hours later, Kuzia the cat looked on, bewildered and bedraggled by a steady rain, as “Uncle Seriozha” from the wall drawings tried to sort through the charred wreckage of their single-storey home. He hurled fragments of twisted metal out into the yard, sidestepping a doll thrown to the floor by the blast.
He had been inside too last night, he said, sleeping in the room next to the one that took a direct hit. His parents-in-law are in hospital. His wife, Veronika’s maternal aunt, wandered around the house and yard, silenced by the scale of the tragedy.
Neighbours were stunned at how brutally Russia’s invasion had arrived in this semi-rural suburb of Dnipro. The river port is an industrial and military hub, “closed” to foreigners under the Soviet Union, and a target in repeated wars.
But Veronika’s family home was a long drive from the river, the docks and the factories, in an area where fruit trees in full blossom shade small vegetable patches outside village homes, and rows of tulips brighten muddy lanes.
“Its the first time we’ve had an attack here. We already thought the war was something far away, that wasn’t going to affect us directly,” said Olha, 68, a friend of “grandpa Vova” from the paintings, who was injured.
She works in a shop, and said on Friday morning soldiers who stopped by for supplies told her they had removed an unexploded missile fragment from the damaged house.
That matched the damage to the house, where one wall was missing and there had been a fierce fire, but several walls and windows were still intact. There was no crater, which a cruise missile striking such a small house would be likely to leave behind.
A few hundred metres away, some other piece of falling weaponry had hit the high roof and gables of another house. The gaping holes and black fire damage were visible across a field from Veronika’s home.
Oleksandr Kalinichenko, a neighbour who lives around 300 metres away, said he had ignored air raid sirens until he saw the flash of an explosion. “My wife shouted at me: get into the shelter, immediately,” he said. “At first I thought it was some way away.”
He crawled into the basement, and when he came out, two young neighbours had been killed. “I want to tell you the Russians are pissing us off. I am 70 years old but I want to volunteer for the army, I want to strangle them with my own hands.”
Serhii Lysak, the head of the military administration for the Dnipro region, visited the shattered house to inspect the damage.
“Today we don’t need other proof to show the terrorist activity of the Russian federation. You can see what they have done,” he said, standing in front of Nika’s family portraits.
The young family had only become targets of a Russian strike because they were trying to protect themselves from missiles, said one neighbour, who asked not to be named.
They moved into the suburban house from their own apartment in the city, after a bloody strike on a Dnipro high-rise apartment building in January. The deadliest single assault on the city during this war, the missile killed at least 40 people and injured dozens more.
A similar tragedy unfolded in the central city of Uman on Friday, where another missile slipped through air defences and destroyed much of an apartment building, killing at least 10 people. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has begged his allies for more anti-aircraft missiles, warning that the country’s supplies are running low.
The disaster in Uman shows the risks to civilians if air defences fail. But even when they work, Veronika’s death, in a place her family took her for protection, is a reminder that nowhere is entirely safe in a country at war.
