A snowy evening in January. A tower crane on Kyiv’s left bank lifts a steel frame and places it atop an unfinished apartment block. Twenty two stories up, Viktor, a steel fixer who’d come to the city for work, brings the load in. According to witnesses, this is what happened next: Viktor scrambled up the side of the three-metre high frame and unfastened the hooks connecting it to the crane. When Viktor was sliding back down, he slipped and fell into the void below. He died of injuries sustained in the fall.
The accident took place on 14 January 2019, at the new Seven housing complex in the Ukrainian capital. Three days later, another construction worker lost his life in a deadly accident at this site: a work team was finishing up and heading home when a screw flew off a drill machine, killing a 33-year-old construction worker.
Sadly, these incidents aren’t unprecedented for Ukraine. According to official statistics, there’s roughly 60 fatalities and 200 dangerous accidents a year on the country’s construction sites.
