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A Russian missile attack has killed at least 41 people and injured 180 others in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy said two ballistic missiles struck the territory of an educational institution and a nearby hospital on Tuesday. A building on a campus of the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies was partially destroyed, he added.
The blast waves from the explosions damaged several more buildings nearby and shattered windows, interior minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on messaging platform Telegram.
The attack was one of the worst since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and the deadliest since early July when air strikes hit a children’s hospital in Kyiv and civilian infrastructure in several cities across Ukraine.
Poltava is home to more than 280,000 people and serves as a key military hub, with airfields and training facilities. It also sits on a main road connecting Kyiv to the second-largest city of Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said that “the time interval between the alarm and the arrival of the deadly rockets was so short that it caught people at the moment of evacuation to the bomb shelter”.
As a rescue operation got under way, Zelenskyy “ordered a full and prompt investigation into all of the circumstances” of the strike. The defence ministry said that 25 people had been saved, including 11 who were pulled from beneath the rubble of the institute.
“The Russian scum will surely pay for this strike,” Zelenskyy said in a video statement, repeating recent calls for Ukraine’s western partners to urgently provide Kyiv with more military assistance and to lift restrictions placed on long-range weapons.
Kyiv wants to use US Atacms, British Storm Shadow and French Scalp missiles, all of which have ranges and capabilities beyond most of Ukraine’s own weapons, to strike military targets inside Russia and weaken its ability to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure and terrorise the population.
These targets include missile launch sites, command and control centres and arms depots.
Defence minister Rustem Umerov said that during a Ukrainian delegation’s visit to Washington, he had given a list of key targets to US officials in the hope of winning their approval.
Russian military “Z-bloggers” cheered the attack. “Based on the flood of videos from Poltava . . . the Russian attack on the local communications training centre was highly productive,” said the Rybar military analysis blog, founded by a former staffer of Russia’s defence ministry.
Videos shared on Ukrainian and Russian social media channels showed a seven-storey building with a gaping hole through most of the top floors in one wing, and windows and walls blown out in other wings. Photos showed multiple bodies on the ground in an area strewn with rubble and covered in dust.
“Over 300 people: basically down a battalion. And as I understand, they were not conscripts but highly qualified military specialists,” Yuri Podolyaka, a Ukrainian-born, pro-Kremlin video blogger, claimed to his 3mn subscribers on Telegram. “It’s a very painful loss for the enemy. No wonder there’s such a hysterical response,” he wrote.
Some Ukrainian military personnel and lawmakers questioned Kyiv’s leadership after the devastating attack.
“This isn’t the first time Russia has targeted crowded facilities,” wrote a former Ukrainian officer who runs the analytical group Frontelligence Insight. “It seems many generals still haven’t learned some basic lessons, even in the third year of the war.”
“We continue to urge everyone in the world who has the power to stop this terror: Ukraine needs air defence systems and missiles now, not sitting in storage,” said Zelenskyy. “Every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives.”
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari