Kyiv, Ukraine – Several framed photos on the yellow ground drown amid bouquets of wilting flowers under a wind-shaken strip of red tape.
Above them are towering rectangles of damaged concrete – remnants of a blast-gutted apartment building.
Sasha Paremsky, 11, stood in front of the scene, quietly describing a boy in one of the photos.
“The scariest thing is to see my friend’s photo there. We’d just met to play football before … this,” he told Al Jazeera with a pause.
“This” was the Russian missile attack that killed 32 people, including five children, and wounded more than 150 on July 31. More than a dozen of those injured were children.
The Kremlin said the attack targeted “military factories, a military airstrip’s infrastructure and an ammunition depot”.
In reality, an Iskander ballistic missile hit the nine-storey apartment building next to the Paremsky family home in this rustically quiet neighbourhood that has no factories, military bases or sites, and sits more than 10km (6 miles) west of central Kyiv.
“People cried for help from under the debris. Everything was on fire,” Paremsky said, recalling the hours after the attack. He and his parents helped survivors and rescue workers dig up the wounded and the dead.
Witnesses described the strike’s sound as a snake-like hiss that evolved into an eardrum-popping boom.
“I hear the hissing, and one moment later, I am thrown away from the window” by the shockwave, said Hanna, a survivor.
Among the dead were 23-year-old Mykyta and Sofia Lamekhovs and their two-year-old son Lev, who had fled Sloviansk, the first Ukrainian town that was briefly seized by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014 and is close to the front line again.
“They were such a beautiful couple, I saw them the day before,” one of the neighbours sighed. “She had just gotten pregnant.”
Just one of the many families killed or destroyed otherwise by the russian missile strikes on Kyiv on July 31 just because they were Ukrainians.
Could have been any of you. pic.twitter.com/wazFzVDbtp
— Olga Klymenko (@OlgaK2013) August 2, 2025
The strike was the second-deadliest wartime assault in Kyiv. A missile and drone attack in July 2024 killed 33 people, including five children, and damaged Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital.
The recent attack was the horrifying pinnacle of months-long, almost nightly pummelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
Each involved hundreds of drones and dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles – and followed the Kremlin’s daytime assurances of its readiness to start peace talks, but with a list of conditions that looked like a capitulation demand.
And yet, for many survivors, the most dreadful aftermath is not Moscow’s narratives or United States President Donald Trump’s indecisiveness towards harsher sanctions on Russia.
It is losing hope for help.
“So, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was here. And [Kyiv mayor Vitali] Klitschko. They all said we’d get help. And here were are, with no windows, no subsidies, nothing,” Tamara, a resident, told Al Jazeera.
Most residents covered their windows, gouged out by the blast, with plastic film because the one-time subsidy payment of 10,000 hryvnia ($241) barely covers the cost of a single plastic window.
Hanna claimed that when she was trying to receive the subsidy, a city official told her she had not been listed in the official registry of tenants.
To get registered, she would need the help of a “firm” that would charge her 10,000 hryvnia ($241) to get the job done within a day or two, she claimed to have heard from the official.
Such “firms” often work next to government offices and represent “hidden corruption,” according to experts.
But in this case, the charge seems overtly high.
“It’s very strange that, according to the resident, the cost of the subsidy is equal to the cost of assistance,” Serhii Mitkalyk, head of the Anti-Corruption Headquarters, a nongovernmental group in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
A natural gas pipe that leaked after the blast has been shut off, leaving residents with no fuel for their stoves. Locals accused authorities of refusing to provide a discount for the electricity they now have to use for cooking.
“We are left alone to do everything by ourselves with no help,” Hanna said.
District and city administrations have not commented on the residents’ claims, asking for written requests that remain unanswered.
Al Jazeera has previously reported on years-long delays in the reconstruction of war-damaged apartment buildings and houses.
There are high “corruption risks” during the actual renovation of damaged buildings.
“The biggest abuses are seen during centralised procurement [of construction materials] for reconstruction,” anticorruption expert Mitkalyk said.
“Our organisation monitors such tenders and identifies cases where prices for construction materials are inflated by 20–30 percent compared to market prices,” he said.
“Some of these cases have already become the subject of criminal proceedings and court rulings, but in general, this is the usual work of law enforcement agencies in the field of recovery,” he said.
And then, there is the sheer size of the problem.
Some 60 million square metres (646 million square feet) of housing have been destroyed since 2022, and at least $86bn is needed to rebuild them, authorities said earlier this year.
About 4.6 million Ukrainians are internally displaced, and some 600,000 are registered to get new housing.
In May, the government reported that some 100,000 Ukrainian families have used eVidnodlennya (eRestoration), a programme to compensate the loss of damaged or destroyed real estate.
One can use their smartphone to apply for a subsidy, upload documents and get a money transfer – or go to a government office in person.
However, almost a quarter – 24 percent – of applicants could not get them because of bureaucratic problems, Olena Shulyak, head of the ruling Servant of the People party said on August 1.
Some had no smartphones, others lacked documents, and many cannot get to government offices from areas near the front line, she said.
But the most vulnerable group of homeless Ukrainians – those from Russia-occupied areas that make up some 19 percent of Ukraine’s territory – cannot use the programme because officials are unable to inspect their damaged or destroyed property.
The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s lower house of parliament, voted in a law that simplifies the procedure in December, but Zelenskyy has not signed it yet.
“No real refugee who lost everything in occupied areas got a single penny of this money,” Petro Andriushchenko, former mayor of Russia-occupied southeastern city of Mariupol, wrote on Telegram in May. “The lives of real internally displaced persons have not improved a bit. Not at all. All of this is the great government scam.”
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