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The town that defied Vladimir Putin's blitzkrieg:
Perhaps the first missile of this whole, disastrous, conflict struck the airport at Hostomel a little after 6am. ‘I was having a cup of coffee in my sitting room at the time,’ says 78-year-old Helena. ‘I almost jumped out of my chair!’
Constantin is a security guard at the facility. Having just come off shift, he was lost in a deep sleep. ‘Then my wife began shaking me awake,’ he recalls. ‘She was shouting, “Get up! Get up! There are explosions. Something is happening!”’
We are at ground zero of Putin’s failed blitzkrieg against Kyiv. This is where the balconies of the crumbling Soviet residential blocks provided a front-row seat to Armageddon. It was here, against the airfield of the Antonov aircraft manufacturing company, on the morning of February 24, that the Russian military launched a helicopter-borne infantry assault.
The intention was to link up these crack troops with armoured columns that had crossed the frontier from Belarus and so capture the Ukrainian capital – 15 miles away – within 48 hours.
You can see spray-painted graffiti left by the then confident invaders on a wall of one of Hostomel’s shattered housing estates. One message reads – in Russian – ‘Wolves’ and the date: ‘05.03.2022.’ Another on a garage door boasts: ‘The Truth is Ours.’ But the wolves have now slunk back to Belarus. And the truth about what Russia did here and in neighbouring Bucha is an affront to humanity.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...s-ground-zero-Russias-failed-attack-Kyiv.html
