息子はがれきの下…？　捜索見守る母　ウクライナ・ボロジャンカ

【ＡＦＰ＝時事】ウクライナの首都キーウの北西に位置するボロジャンカ。ロシア軍の砲撃を受けたアパートで、行方不明者の捜索が続いている。（写真はウクライナの破壊された建物。ＥＳＮ提供）
　アントニーナさん（６５）は、アパートの庭だった一角に置かれた椅子に一人座り、捜索活動を見守る。涙の跡が残るその目から、寝不足なのが分かる。３階に息子のユーリーさん（４３）が住んでいた。
　捜索活動の進みはあまりにも遅く感じられる。
　アントニーナさんの自宅は攻撃を免れた。だが、息子が住んでいた５階建ての建物は、ロシアの侵攻が始まってから数日後の３月１日夜、砲撃された。建物の真ん中にぽっかりと穴が開いている。
　１０棟あった建物は数秒で、コンクリートとねじれた金属の山に変わった。
　「夜だったので、中には人がいた」とアントニーナさん。椅子に座り、両手で持ったつえに頭を乗せ、悲しげに捜索活動を見つめる。
　ユーリーさんとは、攻撃があった夜から連絡が取れていない。
　「もしかしたら脱出できたのかもしれない。けがをしているのかも。そこ（がれきの下）にいる可能性もある。私には分からない」と言うと涙を流した。
　がれきの山に交じり、靴や本、水鉄砲、クッション、衣服が散乱している。クマ、キリン、カバのぬいぐるみが一列に並んでいた。
　木の枝には、マットレスが引っかかっている。
　７０代のリュボフ・ヤレメンコさんは、砲撃を受けた時、アパートではなく地下壕（ごう）に避難していた。
　「１か月半近く地下壕にいた。その後、砲撃が続いたので通りの反対側の地下壕に駆け込んだ。転んで肋骨（ろっこつ）を痛めてしまった」と語る。
　ヤレメンコさんは、今でもショックを受けている。「この地下壕にたどり着けない幼い子ども連れの家族がいたようだ」
　ロシアの侵攻前は約１万３０００人が暮らしていたボロジャンカの大通りは、２キロ以上にわたり破壊され、がれきと化している。
　ウクライナ軍は３月末、ロシア軍がキーウ周辺から撤退するとボロジャンカを奪還した。
　ウォロディミル・ゼレンスキー大統領はボロジャンカの状況について、後ろ手に縛られた民間人らの遺体が発見されたブチャよりも「はるかにひどい」としている。
　イリーナ・ベネディクトワ検事総長は７日、崩壊したアパート２棟からこれまでに、２６人の遺体が見つかったと明らかにした。【翻訳編集ＡＦＰＢＢＮｅｗｓ】
〔ＡＦＰ＝時事〕（2022/04/11-10:02）

In the small town of Borodyanka, not far from Kyiv, diggers sort through the rubble of houses destroyed by russian bombardments, looking for the missing.
Her eyes read from tears and lack of sleep, Antonina is watching as one picks through the remains of the building where her son used to live on the third floor.
The slow process is unbearable for the 65-year-old mother, whose own home was spared by the fighting.
There's a gaping hole in the middle of the five-storey building, where the it was hit by a bomb dropped from a Russian plane on the evening of March 1, a few days after the start of the invasion.
In a few seconds, the ten apartments that used to stand here were turned into a heap of concrete and twisted metal.
There were people in this building, it was night, says Antonia, wearing a brown coat and a blue woollen hat.
Antonina sits alone on a chair in the corner of what used to be the building's garden. She holds a cane in front of her in both hands and rests her head on top, a sad, thoughtful look on her face as she watches the diggers do their work.
The people who stayed in the two blocks on the sides of the building were hurt but they're still alive, she says. Those that stayed (in the middle section), they're all dead.
- 'Maybe he is still there' -
Antonina has not heard from her son Yuri, 43, since the night the bomb fell.
Maybe he managed to get out, maybe he is hurt, maybe he is still there (under the rubble). I can't say, I don't know, she says, before bursting into tears.
Scattered in the ruins of the building there's a pair of shoes, a book, a water-pistol, some cushions, clothes and three stuffed animals, a bear, a giraffe and a hippo, all next to each other.
A mattress is caught in the branches of a tree.
On the ground floor of one of the still-standing blocks, Lyubov Yaremenko's apartment used to have a little terrace.
With the forecast for rain, she puts a plastic tarp over the brown sofa she's placed where the patio was.
It is the only piece of furniture she was able to save from her house, where everything else was devastated by the explosion.
Doors came off their hinges, windows smashed, the cupboards were knocked over and clothes thrown everywhere.
- 'More horrific' -
When the bomb hit, Lyubov, an olderly lady of around 70, was not in her apartment but in the cellar.
We stayed so long underground, almost a month and a half, first here, then we ran to the cellar on the other side of the street as they were bombing... I fell and hurt my ribs, says Lyubov still shocked.
It seems there was a family with young children in this cellar, that they can't yet reach, she says.
The main road in Borodyanka is now nothing more than a near-two-kilometre-long strip of ruins and devastation.
The town, which numbered around 13,000 inhabitants before the war, was retaken by Ukrainian forces at the end of March after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region around Kyiv.
Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Saturday that worse was still being uncovered.
They have started sorting through the ruins in Borodianka, northwest of Kyiv, he said. It is much more horrific there. There are even more victims of Russian occupiers.
He has said that the situation in Borodyanka is much more horrific than in Bucha, where dead civilians were discovered, some of them with their hands tied behind their backs.
Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said on Thursday that 26 bodies had been recovered from two destroyed apartment buildings in Borodyanka so far.
Across from the main square, another, taller building of eight storeys has also seen one third of its mass shorn off by a bomb. A crane is working to remove hulking pieces of its walls, blackened by the explosion.
Two rescue workers in a cherry picker look through the windows of the standing apartments one by one, looking for bodies.
We would have liked it to be a simple rescue operation but the strikes were end of February, early March, says Svetlana Vodolaha, an emergency services worker from Kyiv.
We don't have an exact figure for the number of people that could still be trapped under the collapsed buildings, but we have to search all of them, she says.