Russian missiles struck a military academy in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday only minutes after air-raid alarms blared, killing more than 50 people, wounding many others and underscoring Moscow’s superior firepower in one of the war’s deadliest attacks. Ukraine’s president said a hospital also was hit.
Rescue workers in the eastern city of Poltava described scenes of dismembered bodies pulled from the rubble of the school, which Ukrainian news outlets identified as the Poltava Institute of Military Communications.
The entire area was littered with shattered glass, with nearby high-rises missing windows and doors. By some accounts more than 200 people suffered injuries, overwhelming hospitals.
Denys Kliap, the 26-year-old director of Free and Unbreakable, a volunteer emergency response team, was asleep when the first blast rocked him out of bed. “As soon as it happened, we went straight to the site,” Mr. Kliap said. “When we arrived, the only thing I remember was the pile of bodies scattered all over the territory of the institute.”
While he has seen many horrific scenes, the devastation after Tuesday’s strikes was shocking, he said. He recalled bodies being pulled from the rubble “without legs, others without arms, some even without heads.”
The strike was a demoralizing blow to Ukraine, coming as its troops have been retreating from relentless Russian advances along the war’s main front in the Donbas region.
“Russia is taking away our most valuable asset, our lives,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said of the missile strike.
The attack on Tuesday extended a wave of Russian assaults on cities across Ukraine that began a week ago and that have been among the largest since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strike had been carried out with ballistic missiles, which can travel at supersonic speed and reach a target anywhere in Ukraine in a matter of minutes.
Witnesses said the strikes, one after the other, had come shortly after the air raid sirens sounded. The Ukrainian Air Force said that the short time between the warning siren and the strikes demonstrated the speed of the missiles, which arrived “literally a matter of minutes” after launch.
Poltava is a little more than 100 miles from the Russian border.
Ukraine has pleaded since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 for more tools to defend its skies from Russian missiles, and on Tuesday Mr. Zelensky took to social media to issue a fresh request for more aid. “Ukraine needs air defense systems and missiles now, not sitting in storage,” he wrote.
The only proven defense against ballistic missiles, Patriot missile systems, were sent from the United States and Germany but did not arrive until the spring of 2023 and Ukraine says it needs more.
Mr. Zelensky has said he desperately needs at least seven Patriot batteries to fend off attacks across the country. Germany has sent three and, in July, President Biden announced the deployment of a second Patriot missile system from the United States. Other American allies also have Patriots: Romania has pledged one, and the Netherlands has given parts of the complex system. U.S. officials have said they hope European powers will send more.
It was unclear if Ukraine used any of those Patriot batteries to try to fend off Tuesday’s attack in Poltava.
A number of questions about the strikes, and the high death toll, remained unanswered on Tuesday. Ukrainian media accounts as well as Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed occupation official in southern Ukraine, said cadets had been lined up for an event at the school when the missiles struck. Those accounts could not be independently verified, and at two witnesses said they did not see evidence that the victims had been assembled in a large gathering.
Since the start of the war, Ukraine has banned large gatherings, including at sports stadiums and large concert venues. But large numbers of people still congregate in malls, schools and markets.
In recent weeks the pace of the war has accelerated in Ukraine, both in the air and on the ground.
Russian advances in the direction of the eastern city of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, have prompted local authorities to urge civilians to evacuate and the Ukrainian military to send reinforcements.
The capture of Pokrovsk by Russian forces would be their biggest gain in the region since they seized Avdiivka in January and February after intense ground fighting and bombardment. It also would bring Russian forces one step closer to achieving a key goal for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: full control of the Donbas.
Mr. Putin was in Mongolia on Tuesday, some 3,000 miles from the front lines of the Ukraine war. He said nothing in public about Ukraine, according to Kremlin transcripts of his remarks.
Attempts by Ukraine to divert the focus of war have so far not borne fruit. The incursion into the Kursk region of Russia in early August by Ukrainian forces drew Russian reinforcements but not from the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday said the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk was going “according to plan.” He told NBC News in an interview Tuesday that Ukraine would hold onto Russian territory for an unspecified amount of time. “For now, we need it,” he said, adding that it was part of a “victory plan.”
The Ukrainian military has also for months been targeting Russian oil and gas facilities with drone attacks. But the campaign has not yet had a demonstrable effect on the fighting in the Donbas.
Ukraine had hoped that the long-awaited arrival of Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets would assist in repelling Russian attacks. That effort suffered a blow last week when one of the warplanes crashed while defending against an intense Russian aerial attack, in what may have been a friendly-fire incident.
Reporting was contributed by Cassandra Vinograd, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Liubov Sholudko, Anton Troianovski, Andrew E. Kramer and Thomas Fuller.
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