Rescue workers clear debris from a destroyed floor of a military academy struck by Russian missiles in Poltava, Ukraine, on Sept. 3, 2024.DAVID GUTTENFELDER/The New York Times News Service
At least 51 people were killed when a pair of Russian missiles slammed into a military training facility in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava on Tuesday, one of the deadliest incidents in 2½ years of war.
The missiles hit the courtyard of the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies, a training centre for signals officers, who specialize in radar and electronic warfare. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 271 people were injured, and Philip Pronin, the governor of the Poltava region, said “up to 18 people” were still trapped beneath the rubble as dusk fell.
Many of the victims were believed to be soldiers or cadets. The Ukrainian military released a statement saying there were “dozens dead and hundreds injured,” adding, “We lost brave Ukrainians, our brothers and sisters, soldiers.”
Photographs posted to social media showed a deep crater in front of a seven-storey building, the façade of which had been largely torn off by the force of the blast. In Soviet times, the institute was called the Higher Military Command School of Communications. It would have been a site well known to the Russian military. Ten other buildings, including a nearby hospital, were also damaged.
In a video message issued shortly after the attack, Mr. Zelensky said he had ordered “a full and prompt investigation into all of the circumstances of what happened.” He also vowed “the Russian scum will surely pay for this strike.”
Mr. Zelensky repeated his call for Ukraine’s Western allies to supply it with more air-defence weapons and to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia, including the bases from which the long-range Iskander ballistic missiles used in Tuesday’s attack can be launched. “Every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives,” he said.
He later wrote on Telegram that he had spoken Tuesday with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had expressed his condolences for the attack on Poltava. Mr. Zelensky said they had discussed Ukraine’s defence needs, “including additional air defense systems and armored vehicles.”
In a separate statement, the Ukrainian military said the rockets arrived so quickly after the city’s air-raid siren sounded that “it caught people at the moment of evacuation to the bomb shelter.” Poltava, a city of 300,000 people located far from the front lines, had been viewed as a relatively safe region until Tuesday.
Russian military bloggers claimed the victims had been assembled outside for a ceremony marking the start of the academic year when the missiles struck.
That was denied by the Ukrainian military. “There was no parade or any other event at the time of the airstrike.”
Mr. Pronin declared three days of official mourning and called for Ukrainians to donate blood to help those injured in the strike. “This is a stunning tragedy for all of Ukraine. The enemy hit an educational institution and a hospital,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, wrote on social media.
Video posted on social media and verified by Reuters shows the scale of destruction after Russia struck a military institute in the central town of Poltava with missiles, killing dozens and wounding more than 200, Ukraine's first lady said.
Reuters
The incident recalled previous Russian strikes on military facilities that inflicted mass casualties on grouped Ukrainian soldiers or cadets, including a strike last year on a medal ceremony in the southern Zaporizhzhia region that left 19 soldiers dead. Another one, early in the war, struck the Yavoriv training base in western Ukraine, killing 64, including some foreign volunteers.
The deadliest incident involving Ukrainian soldiers occurred in May, 2022, when 87 were killed at a training base in the northern Chernihiv region.
Yuriy Butusov, a prominent Ukrainian military journalist, said it is now standard practice for award ceremonies and other such events to be held in small groups – no larger than 30 or 40 – and usually in bunkers or other discreet locations. Writing on Facebook, Mr. Butusov argued that there was no justification for upward of 200 troops to be gathered outside a known military facility “for some event” that had obviously been spotted by the Russian side. He predicted that the tragedy in Poltava would be repeated unless the Ukrainian officers responsible for organizing the event were punished with “loss of rank and a real prison term.”
The deadly blast is the latest in a surge of Russian air attacks since Ukrainian troops crossed into the Kursk region of Russia one month ago Tuesday. Though Russian forces have yet to mount a substantial counteroffensive in Kursk – where Ukraine claims to control around 1,300 square kilometres – Kyiv and other cities have been pounded with some of the largest missile and drone barrages since the start of the war. Meanwhile, Russian troops have kept up their grinding offensive in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region, where they are approaching the outskirts of the strategic city of Pokrovsk.
Tuesday’s attack came as Russian President Vladimir Putin made an official visit to Mongolia, which received him with a guard of honour, despite an outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court for his arrest for the alleged war crime of overseeing the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Mongolia, a member of the ICC, ignored a Ukrainian request to arrest the Russian leader.