[3] Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Borodianka, a quiet "one-street town"[4] to the north of Kyiv, had roughly 13,000 residents.

[11][12] Oleksiy Reznikov, minister of defense, said many residents were buried alive by airstrikes and lay dying for up to a week.

[12] On 2 May 2022, employees of the State Emergency Service rescued a cat from the seventh floor of a destroyed building, which spent about two months there without food or water and became a symbol of the indomitability of the Ukrainian people in the fight against the Russian occupiers.

The human death toll remained unclear: one resident reported that he knew of at least five civilians killed, but that others were beneath the rubble and that no one had yet attempted to extricate them.

"[10][5] President Volodymyr Zelensky subsequently said that the death toll at Borodianka was "even worse" than at Bucha.

[19][20][21] According to Europe 1, ten days after the Russian army had left, firefighters were still working to recover bodies from the rubble in order to bury them with dignity.