Two missiles hit the Military Institute of Telecommunications in Poltava, central Ukraine – and the hospital next to it – at around 9:10 am on Tuesday, September 3 (8:10 am in Paris). Several hundred people were reported to have been on the university grounds, which are hidden from view by trees and framed on all four sides by buildings and houses. The site was completely inaccessible early on Tuesday evening.
By that time, the death toll reached at least 51, with more than 200 wounded, but could “unfortunately increase significantly,” according to Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. This could be the deadliest bombing in Ukraine since the Russian invasion of February 2022.
Poltava, a regional capital with a population of almost 300,000, welcomes a large number of students every year, including those arriving to attend the military institute at the start of the new academic year. “Our classes started at 8:20 am in the large instructional building,” said Nikita, 26, a programmer from Odesa recruited against his will on June 11, following the new mobilization law. On August 27, he began a month-long training course at this telecommunications school with colleagues of all ages.
“An alert sounded in the school and on our phone. Less than two minutes later, the first missile fell on the building. It was 9:10 am. Then, a second or two later, a second missile crashed,” added the newly mobilized soldier, who boards at one of the school’s three barracks.
‘Full and speedy investigation’
The two strikes both caught students who were beginning to make their way to safety in a building other than the main one. “It was the people who were outside and on the stairs of the lower floors who were killed,” explained the young soldier, “because the missile
hit at the level of the 3th floor.” He himself was already in the massed crowd on the first floor. Only the right leg of the young man with the chestnut beard and blue eyes was affected, scratched by shards of glass from the exploding front door.
“I have ordered a full and speedy investigation into the circumstances of what happened” in Poltava, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday in a video posted on his Telegram channel. Ukrainian military bloggers claimed on social media that the missiles had targeted an official open-air military ceremony. However, “No military gathering had taken place in the courtyard,” assures our soldier, integrated this summer into the Ukrainian army’s 3rd tank brigade.
The Poltava region had so far been relatively unaffected by Russian strikes apart from the strike on a supermarket in Krementchouk in June 2022, which killed 20 people and wounded 69, and those on the Myrgorod airfield. On Friday, August 30, an industrial site was targeted by a drone attack in Poltava without causing any casualties, said a regional governor. And on Tuesday evening, the streets of this pretty tree-lined town remained busy.