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 Ms. 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, Ms. 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 that it believed that 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.
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