On the evening of March 20, 2022, Russian forces launched several strikes on the Podilskyi district of Kyiv. They shelled the Retroville shopping and entertainment center. Part of the shopping center was destroyed, cars parked nearby, a fitness club and a business center. Nearby residential buildings, schools and kindergartens suffered significant damage. Eight people were killed that day.
Rescuers received a report of the fire at 22:48 and immediately went to the scene. “We arrived very quickly — everything was burning, the neighboring houses had no glass on the ground floors. On the corner was a Leroy Merlin household goods store from which an ax flew. It flew a hundred meters from such an explosive wave,” recalls Pavlo Petrov, a photographer at the State Emergency Service of Ukraine. At the beginning of a full-scale war, the rescuers already had a lot of challenges to the places where the missiles hit, so they were already used to large-scale destruction. Instead, the fire in the Retroville shopping center was very difficult to extinguish, all the facades of the mall were made of combustible materials. It was necessary to disassemble the rubble in parallel and prevent the spread of flames. Rescuers were divided into several groups and worked in different locations — near the facades, inside. They started at eleven o'clock in the evening, and localized (that is, stopped the spread of fire) around 2 o'clock in the evening. More than 60 people and 11 units of equipment were involved.
“A pipe burst and the first floor was somewhere ankle-deep in hot water. The air was filled with steam, - says the photographer. “I remembered the center like this - without light, without ceiling, with the dead. Immediately at the entrance lay a man torn by an explosion and the guys collected it. I am very excited to come here now.”
Rescuers cleared the rubble the next day. The fire was very large and it was completely eliminated almost in the south. “Emotionally, this mall fire was not the most difficult. Previously, we had to work near residential buildings that were hit by a rocket. However, this fire was very large and terrible. When we arrived, the facade was still crumbling and crumbling. Such a hell,” explains Pavel Petrov.
Photographer Oleg Petrasyuk arrived at the scene a day after the bombing of the shopping center, on March 22, 2022. He says the spectacle was terrifying.
“I came there a day after the shelling. I filmed the aftermath of the shelling of Kiev on Salyutnaya Street, there I met a colleague and we decided to drive to “Retroville”, to see for ourselves. We made a couple of identical frames, I am in color, it is black and white” - recalls the photographer.
Oleg says that then these photos were not published anywhere, and therefore he took them for his own archive.
On March 23, the Retroville shopping and entertainment center was shelled by Russian troops with mortars. Two people were killed in the shelling: Oksana Baulina, a journalist for The Insider, who was reviewing the aftermath of the previous strike, and a random passer-by.
Recall that the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers has started a series of materials dedicated to key events of the Russian war against Ukraine, where we will publish memories and photos of Ukrainian documentary photographers.
The project is implemented thanks to support of ZMIN.
The material was worked on:
Researcher of the topic, author of the text: Katya Moskalyuk
Bildeditor: Vyacheslav Ratynskyi
Literary Editor: Julia Foutei
Site Manager: Vladislav Kuhar
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