In the first weeks of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, residents of Chernihiv were shaken by heavy gunfire followed by billowing black smoke. Ukrainian forces had shot down a Russian fighter jet, whose two pilots parachuted into the northern city. It was a dramatic day at the critical start of a war that began badly for Russia.
Yulia Hrebneva, a resident of the nothern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv and member of the regional parliament, displays the cellar where her family was sheltering when Ukrainian forces brought down a Russian Sukhoi-34 fighter jet.
"We went down there into the cellar on the fifth of March just to tidy up, change the sheets, and as it happened just a couple of minutes after we went down, the house started to collapse," she explained.
It was only later that Hrebneva would see the cause. The debris of the downed Sukhoi-34 still lies in the spot where it fell. Two Russian pilots were seen ejecting from the jets.
Five houses in Chernihiv were destroyed during the incident. One resident was killed.
Tragedy struck Svitlana Voyteshenko's family that fateful day.
"We saw that something had fallen, over there, and the smoke. My brother decided to go and see what was going on, he went out and saw the pilot had landed here, and ran after him," she said. "My brother chased him over here, and just there in the chicken coop… the pilot killed him."
