KYIV, Ukraine — She went to sleep in her bed on the ninth floor of an apartment building in Kyiv and woke up on a pile of rubble outside. She saw her leg covered in blood and cried out for help, thinking only of the pain, she would later say, and not how she had survived.

A rescuer climbed atop the debris and carried Veronika Osintseva, 23, to the pavement below. There she sat and waited for medical assistance in the aftermath of a Russian missile strike last week that killed 28 people, five of them children. It was one of the deadliest nights in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, during more than three years of war, with 32 people killed in all.

Only later would Osintseva learn that her parents, who had been sleeping in another room of the apartment when the missile destroyed giant portions of the building, were among the dead.

As Russia’s relentless missile and drone attacks inflict a growing civilian toll across Ukraine, Osintseva’s unlikely survival has captivated Ukrainians and highlighted the element of luck that often determines who lives and who dies.

Kyiv’s police department said it believed she was indeed blown out of her apartment by the explosion but that it had no explanation for how she had made it through her fall.

Neither did Osintseva herself. “I don’t know how I flew, but I somehow stayed alive,” she said during an interview in her hospital room, where she was surrounded by her friends and those of her deceased parents.

Dr. Serhiy Dubrov, the hospital’s director, said Osintseva had suffered a broken leg, a concussion and numerous lacerations. “Miracles happen,” he said of her survival.

Osintseva was interviewed by TV reporters in the hospital and her story spread quickly. As a war-weary public in Ukraine lapped up the details, she has become known as the woman who fell nine stories and lived.

“An angel was holding her,” said Veronika Polishchuk, 40, a neighbor. “The world still needs her,” she added.

When the missile struck the apartment building around 4 a.m. July 31, Osintseva’s childhood friend Viktoria Cherniuk, who lives nearby, was awakened. She looked outside but could see only a swirl of black smoke.

When the sun rose about an hour later, she could see that her friend’s apartment was gone. She looked down from her balcony and saw medics carrying Osintseva on a stretcher toward an ambulance.

“I was just so happy that she was alive,” Cherniuk said.

As news of the attack spread, another friend of the young women, Anastasia Vovkovytska, texted Osintseva. “I hope it is not your house,” she wrote but received no answer. Relief came only later, when Cherniuk sent her a photograph of Osintseva on the stretcher.

Ashot Chakhoyan, 22, who studied with Osintseva at a performing arts college, said Osintseva was special not just because she had survived the fall but also because of her “strong feeling of justice.”

“She survived for a reason, for humanity to understand something,” he said.

Osintseva trained as a singer and has been passionate about political activism.

Before the missile attack on her building, and during a recent wave of anti-corruption protests in Kyiv — the first street demonstrations since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — Osintseva had drawn attention by scrawling slogans in chalk on the asphalt while most of her fellow demonstrators were carrying placards.

On the night before the missile attack, she had written a speech in her room that she had planned to deliver at a protest the next day.

“Our home is beginning to look like a catastrophe,” she wrote. She meant a political catastrophe caused by the government’s attempt to hobble Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption agencies, a move that has since been reversed under domestic and international pressure.

She hardly expected that the sentence would apply to her own home.

In her hospital bed, she said she felt strongly about injustices in the world.

“How is it possible that we are still fighting in the 21st century? How is it possible that we produce weapons when no one has a right to take somebody’s life,” she asked, bursting into tears but bringing herself together with the help of a friend’s hugs.

“I want to be heard,” Osintseva said. “I am often told that we can’t change anything. But a human always has a choice between violence and peace.”

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Maria Varenikova/Oksana Parafeniuk
c. 2025 The New York Times Company