In Kyiv’s Obolon district, explosives specialists from the state emergency service recovered the warhead and harmless remnants of a ballistic missile that had struck the courtyard of high-rise apartment blocks on Saturday. This was reported by the capital’s emergency service on Sunday on Telegram, as the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda reports.
The statement reads verbatim: “In Kyiv, at the site of one of the enemy attacks in the Obolon district, a pyrotechnic team of the group for pyrotechnic works, underwater and humanitarian demining of the ARZ SP recovered the warhead and harmless remnants of a ballistic missile.” According to the emergency service, the missile struck the courtyard of high-rise apartment blocks and damaged a single-storey building. The emergency services once again pointed out that suspicious objects should be kept at a distance and that the emergency numbers 101 or 112 should be called immediately.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, the find site is connected with the Russian attack on Kyiv on 10 October. According to Ukrainska Pravda, a restaurant building was hit in the Obolon district; at another address in Obolon, missile debris fell into the courtyard of a residential building. Previously, in the Solomianka district, debris from a drone had crashed onto a 25-storey residential building and an eight-storey office building. As early as 8 October, according to the outlet, police explosives experts had defused two undetonated ballistic missiles with which Russian forces had attacked Kyiv on 7 October.
A pattern that repeats itself
The recovery of a warhead left lying around is not an isolated case. As early as 24 May, sappers from the emergency service in Kyiv had recovered, after a night-time wave of attacks, the warhead of a Russian missile that had hit a building but had not detonated. As zn.ua reported on the same day, citing the Kyiv emergency service, the mobile rapid response team called on residents of neighbouring buildings to leave their apartments while the unexploded missile tip was being defused. The pyrotechnicians took the find away for later destruction.
According to zn.ua, in the same night a unit of the emergency service itself also came under fire: a shift of 30 emergency personnel had been able to get to a shelter in time. After the explosion, one half of the personnel extinguished the fire in their own building, while the other continued to take emergency calls and coordinate assistance throughout the region. Ten fire engines were completely destroyed at this location, but the administration’s work was resumed at a safe location just a few hours later. The news outlet zn.ua also named 77 injured people from the massive missile and drone attacks on Kyiv at the time, including two children; Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko had spoken of 31 residents treated in hospitals.
Such finds also occur in the Kyiv region. As the news outlet Interfax-Ukraine reported on 14 May, citing the State Emergency Service, specialists retrieved parts of a Russian missile from a multi-family building in the village of Chabany. “During an enemy attack, parts of a combat missile flew into apartments of a residential building in the settlement of Chabany. Only by a miracle did the missile not explode inside the high-rise, because that could have led to a large-scale tragedy with numerous victims,” the agency quoted the authority’s Facebook page. The most dangerous situation prevailed in a ground-floor apartment where the warhead was located. The remnants from the second and third floors were recovered with special equipment.
Why the finds remain so dangerous
Undetonated warheads tie up large amounts of personnel and time every time: buildings must be evacuated, streets closed and residents brought to safety until the pyrotechnicians have removed the finds. For the people in Kyiv, this means that the consequences of an attack are often still felt days after the impact – through evacuations, closures and worry about abandoned apartments. The emergency service therefore appeals to the population not to touch suspicious objects, but to keep their distance and call the emergency numbers 101 or 112.
How many such finds have been recovered in total since the start of the Russian war of aggression is not clear from the available reports. What is clear is only that the emergency services in Kyiv and the region are still deployed days after the attacks – on Sunday in the Obolon district, where the warhead has now been removed.
