By Olha Chepil | 2026-01-02

Russian missiles can level homes in seconds. Yet amid the wreckage, rescuers sometimes find people alive in places where survival seems impossible. They call it a miracle -- a mix of luck, timing and circumstances no one can predict.

"There are people who seem to be protected by an invisible force. It is extremely difficult to survive in such conditions. There are no algorithms," Serhiy Danilin, spokesman for Ukraine's State Emergency Service in the Ternopil region, told Kontur.

Fall from the ninth

On the night of July 31, 23-year-old Veronika Osintseva was asleep in her Kyiv apartment when a Russian missile shattered the nine-story building. The blast blew out the walls and hurled her, still on her bed, from the ninth floor.

"After the impact, I passed out. I didn't see anything. But in my head... it's always in slow motion: how everything is cracking, breaking, the walls are falling. Like in a slow-motion movie," Osintseva told Kontur. "I was just sleeping and woke up in the rubble. I was on top, and there were ruins all around. There was no concrete or anything on me."

She broke a leg and lost a tooth; infections forced doctors to operate four times. But she eventually recovered.

Thirty-two residents died that night, including her parents.

"I constantly remember what they looked like. I remember that all their bones were broken -- every single one. And it hurts me all the time that they are not here. They were alive and now they are dead. I think, what did they do to deserve this? And who had the right to do this to them?" Osintesva asked.

She often recalls the feeling of falling.

"As I was falling, it felt like my whole life was falling. All my hopes. And then, it was like a rebirth. That girl who was sleeping up there is no longer me," Osintesva said.

Osintseva has no close relatives left in Kyiv, and she longer speaks with those in Russia and Crimea.

"My dad used to talk with his brother, and they argued all the time. It seems to me that people in Russia either don't understand or are afraid to do anything. They are afraid to speak out against the authorities, because people there are grabbed and put into prison. I don't know how they feel about it," she said.

Before the war, she studied at the Academy of Circus and Variety Arts and explored web design. Now she runs her late mother's children's stationery business. She says she keeps going because stopping would feel like surrender.

"I want to continue to see the world I love," she said. "If I had the opportunity to address the world, I would say, nobody needs war. People, come to your senses."

Pocket in the rubble

On June 26, 2022, Russian bombers launched Kh-101 cruise missiles at Kyiv. One struck a nine-story residential building, igniting fires and pancaking sections of the structure.

"I always say, until we clear the rubble, it's very difficult to say whether there's hope or not. Because sometimes miracles happen. There are cases that are hard to believe," Svetlana Vodolaga, press secretary for Ukraine's State Emergency Service, told Kontur.

In this case, 7-year-old Zhenya and her mother, Ekaterina Volkova, were trapped beneath collapsed floors. Zhenya's father died instantly.

"The floor slabs collapsed in such a way that it formed a kind of 'pocket.' One slab remained standing while the others fell. We had to cut through the structures -- not dismantle them -- to get the child out," Vodolaga said. "The work was very difficult."

Rescuers reached the girl first; she directed them to her mother, who was also alive.

Zhenya suffered only scrapes, while her mother had a spinal compression fracture. The girl's gymnastics training helped her curl into the narrow space. Later, firefighters found the only unburned item in the apartment -- her gymnastics leotard -- and delivered it to her in the hospital.

"It was such an extraordinary story. I always remember it," Vodolaga said.

A trip for milk

A missile strike on Ternopil on November 19 killed 38 people and injured 93. Pharmacist Maria Palahniuk was in her apartment with her two children -- 6-year-old Kamila and 1-year-old Nazar -- while her husband, Kamal, stepped into the kitchen for milk before taking them to a shelter. The missile hit then.

"Everything that was in his apartment was buried under rubble, and he was left alone," Danilin said.

The apartment collapsed on the room where the mother and children sat; only Kamal survived. He waited outside for three days while rescuers dug through the ruins. On the third day, crews recovered the bodies of his family.

"He survived but had no joy from it, because his entire family died. At the cemetery, he rocked his son's coffin," Danilin said.

From the same strike, rescuers pulled 20-year-old Bogdan Kobel from the wreckage of what had been a ninth-floor apartment. Crews heard faint sounds after ordering silence.

"Basically, the top two floors were no longer there. It was very difficult to understand which floor was which," Danilin recalled.

Kobel had been pinned near the refrigerator, trapped in a fetal position for more than 10 hours with little air and multiple fractures.

"His condition was serious. He has many fractures, and his eyes were injured. But he is conscious and in good condition," Danilin recalled.

He said such rescues underscore both resilience and fragility: "Of course, you need to go to a shelter when you hear the alarm. But there are cases where people went to a shelter -- and that's where the missile hit."