A helicopter crash has dealt a heavy blow to Ukraine’s government

YURI AND his wife Vera, both pensioners, thought the sharp sound was an approaching Russian missile, one of many they had seen tear through the skies above their neighbourhood of Brovary, in the east of Kyiv. Vera threw herself against one of the walls of their flat and prayed. “If I’m lucky, I will survive,” she recalls thinking. Yet the explosion that shook Brovary seconds later was from a helicopter, which struck a kindergarten outside their apartment block, then crashed into another building about a hundred metres away.