At least 50 killed in Russian attack on Poltava

Over 271 people are said to be injured, they say. Poltava Governor Filip Pronin says 15 people may be buried in the rubble.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyj has previously said that the area was hit by two long-range rockets.

The Poltava region is located in the east-central part of Ukraine, about 12 miles from the Russian border.

– People ended up under the rubble. Many were saved, Zelenskyj said in a video published on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday.

Asking for more air defense

The president also said that a building belonging to the Department of Communications was partially destroyed.

– The Russian scum will definitely be held responsible for this attack, Zelenskyj said further and reiterates that Ukraine needs more air defense from Western countries.

He also asked allies to allow the use of long-range weapons against targets further inside Russian territory, as he has done a number of times in the past.

– We continue to tell everyone in the world what can stop this terror. Air defense and missiles are needed in Ukraine, not in a warehouse somewhere.

It is not clear when the attack took place, but the Russian Air Force announced on Tuesday morning that Russia, among other things, fired two ballistic missiles at Ukraine during the night.

Reactions

Ukraine’s allies in the West react strongly to the attack. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock says Putin’s brutality “knows no limits”.

– He must be held responsible, she said in a message on X.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy called the attack “sickening”.

– The attack is yet another reminder of Putin’s brutality against the Ukrainian people, said John Kirby, spokesman for the US National Security Council.

Military Institute

Poltava is the name of both a county and a large city. The region has hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

If the information is confirmed, it is one of the deadliest attacks against Ukraine since Russia went to full-scale war against Ukraine.

Unverified images circulating on social media show bodies lying in front of a large multi-storey building. The building, which has extensive damage, is said to have been the premises of the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Poltava.

According to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, at least 25 people were rescued from the ruins. In the nearby residential area, windows were broken and facades damaged by the blast wave.

Poltava Governor Pronin says many residents have donated blood to help the wounded after the attack. The local authorities have declared a mourning period of three days.

Hard battles

After more than two and a half years of war, Russia controls around 18 percent of Ukraine.

In the last month, the fighting has intensified. Russian forces have advanced in fierce battles in eastern Ukraine, where they have targeted the city of Pokrovsk.

Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger Jurij Podoljaka claimed on Monday that intense fighting is taking place in Selydove, 20 km south of Pokrovsk, and Ukrainsk, 14 km south of Selydove.

At the same time, Ukraine’s forces have captured parts of the Kursk region in Russia.

Russia captured 477 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in August, while Ukraine has taken control of between 1,150 and 1,300 square kilometers of Russian territory, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) analyzed by AFP.

Drone war

In recent weeks, Russia has directed extensive drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian targets, while Ukraine has sharply stepped up its drone attacks against Russian targets.

Military airbases at Lipetsk, Olenja and Morozovsk are among the targets that have been attacked in Russia. Ukraine has also attacked a number of Russian refineries and oil storage facilities.

A diesel warehouse near the town of Proletarsk in Rostov burned for over two weeks after a Ukrainian drone attack on 18 August. The Glubokinskaja oil depot in the same region was also ravaged by fire after a drone attack last week.

On Sunday, the Kapotnja oil refinery in southeast Moscow was attacked by Ukrainian drones, and a fire was also reported here.

On the same day, power plants in both the Russian capital and the Tver region northeast of the city were attacked. Russian media then published videos showing fires in the aftermath of the attacks.