At least 51 people were killed and at least 271 injured Tuesday in a Russian missile strike on the city of Poltava in central Ukraine, which partially destroyed a military institute, according to a new official toll that is likely to rise further.
“As of 18:00 (15:00 GMT), 51 people were killed and more than 200 injured in the attack,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said. Regional Governor Filip Pronin added that “up to 18 people could be under the rubble.”
In his daily online address early this evening, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that the search for survivors in the rubble was continuing and that the number of injured had so far risen to 271.
Popular bloggers and officials have harshly criticized the Ukrainian military command after the particularly deadly attack, which they said targeted a group of soldiers gathered for an outdoor ceremony.
President Zelensky said two ballistic missiles hit “an educational institution and a nearby hospital” in Poltava.
“One of the buildings of the Institute of Communications was partially destroyed. People were found under the rubble,” he stressed in a video message, speaking of this establishment founded in the 1960s and which trains specialists in military telecommunications.
According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the strike took place within a very short time after the air raid alert was triggered. The missiles “caught people evacuating to the underground shelter.”
“Thanks to the coordinated work of rescuers and doctors, 25 people were rescued, eleven of whom were able to be freed from the rubble. Rescuers are currently continuing their work,” the ministry added.
The attack took place in the morning on Poltava, a city located about 300 kilometers east of kyiv and which had some 300,000 inhabitants before the Russian invasion.
An AFP journalist on the scene saw several ambulances heading towards the site shortly after the strike. Local media broadcast appeals for people to donate blood.
Images posted on social media showed a multi-storey building gutted and rescuers working amid rubble.
– “Tragedies repeat themselves” –
The bombing was condemned by National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who said it was “a terrible reminder” of President Putin’s “brutality.”
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy called it “a sickening act of aggression in (Vladimir) Putin’s heinous and illegal war in Ukraine.”
“Putin’s brutality knows no bounds,” said his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock.
The strike also sparked anger among Ukrainian military bloggers, who, like in Russia, have some influence because of the war.
According to some of them, the Russian army was aiming for an official military ceremony in the open air, meaning a large concentration of soldiers made them an easy target.
“Poltava… How did such a large number of people get gathered in such a facility?” asked blogger Sergei Naumovitch, followed by more than 135,000 people on Facebook.
MP Mariana Bezugla, a member of the parliament’s defense committee and a strong critic of the Ukrainian military command, expressed regret on Telegram that no high-ranking officers had been punished for endangering groups of servicemen during similar incidents in the past.
“The tragedies keep happening. When will it stop?” she wrote.
The Ministry of Defense assured for its part that no open-air ceremony was taking place at the time of the tragedy.
The Ukrainian president said he had ordered “a full and rapid investigation” into the circumstances that led to the Russian attack.
He also promised to hold Russia “accountable” and once again called on kyiv’s Western allies to urgently deliver more air defense systems and allow Ukraine to reach deep into Russian territory with the long-range missiles it has been supplied with.
Several Western countries, including the United States, have so far refused to give the green light to such bombings beyond the border regions for fear of an escalation with Moscow.
The Russian military command had also been strongly criticized on several occasions since the start of the war following deadly Ukrainian strikes targeting concentrations of soldiers.
Russian military bloggers on Tuesday released aerial footage taken by a drone that appears to match the institute’s building in Poltava.
Last week, the Ukrainian army command had already found itself under pressure due to the crash of an F-16 fighter jet, a valuable piece of military equipment recently delivered to kyiv after more than two years of waiting, and the death of its pilot, trained in the United States.
Mr Zelensky then dismissed the air force commander, Mykola Oleshchuk.
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