At noon yesterday, 50 men and women were standing outside a yellow building in the historic centre of Lviv. They were waiting for the remains of relatives and friends to be unloaded from one of four refrigerated lorries for identification in the incongruously handsome city morgue.
Twenty-four hours earlier, those friends and relatives had been enjoying the July sun, drinking beer from plastic cups and photographing their children in front of the helicopters at an airshow celebrating the anniversary of a local air battalion. Then 22 tonnes of steel came crashing down from the sky without warning.
Minutes before the Russian SU-27 smashed into an IL-76 aircraft on the ground, Tetiana Yudina, had boarded the rear of the IL-76 with her grandson, Boria. Speaking outside intensive care the following day she retraced the event:
"I said that I'd go up to the cabin with Boria to bring him up to the front cabin and my husband went around the front of the plane to take a picture." When she felt the impact she threw her grandson to the ground before picking him up and running from the plane.
"When the smoke died down, I saw the field which had been full of people. I could only saw emptiness and pieces of meat."
After leaving the five-year-old with some soldiers she went back to find the red shirt of her husband, lying beside a piece of metal from the plane. He was found nearby, still breathing, and was taken to wait for an ambulance. Tetiana remained hopeful yesterday afternoon that he would regain consciousness.
Alexander Yakubishen was not so lucky: neither his sister nor his niece was on the list of 30 patients on the wall of the Skoraya Pomoch Hospital. Getting into a friend's red Lada, he was driven across town to the morgue. Outside the men and women stood looking through gates guarded by policemen waiting to find out if their loved ones had perished.
Struggling with their grief some sat down in tears, others embraced, while one woman almost collapsed. For Alexander, the news was bad.
"My sister's daughter is already dead, she passed away, we already found out," he said struggling. "We're just waiting to find out about my sister. She may still be alive."
"Zhenia went to that wretched show with three friends," said her father Mikhailo Timochyk (40). "We didn't have any problem about her going there." "Her friends came back, but she's missing," he said, clutching a photograph of the girl: "We checked with her friends. We know she was at the airfield. I pray to God she's saved," he added, voice trembling. "I've already been to the mortuary and every hospital in Lviv, and I haven't found her, not among the dead, not among the injured."
Some people had happier stories, tales reminiscent of survivors' stories from the September 11th attacks. All around the city there were people feeling blessed to have escaped the carnage wreaked by the SU-27.
Bogdan Lozinsky, a sound engineer, should have been working on the sound for a transmission on Lviv's Channel 12, which would have shown the tragedy live if it hadn't been cancelled at the last minute. As it happened, he was in a studio to receive the first reports from the catastrophe and to phone his wife Marta to discover that she too had decided to stay at home.
"My kids had practice," she explained, "If it wasn't for the rehearsal I would have been there too."
A friend of Bogdan's, Yaroslav, had just completed a pyrotechnical display at the air show when tragedy struck. Narrowly missed by the fighter he was given a perfect view of the falling jet. "The plane came down and hit a MIG 25 on the ground, destroying it," he recalled early on Sunday morning.
"It then hit a part of the IL-76 cargo plane and the left side of an AN craft. We fell from the explosion when the wave hit us. When I managed to stand there was panic. Everyone was running away. I was only fifty metres away from the victims."