▲ Firefighters battle a fire at an electrical substation bombed by Russian forces in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region.Photo Ap

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, September 4, 2024, p. 25

Moscow. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 injured yesterday after two ballistic missiles hit Iskander-M Russians on the territory that houses the Military Institute of Communications in the city of Poltava, central Ukraine, about 120 kilometers from the border with Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported loud explosions in the territory of an educational institution and a neighboring clinic. One of the buildings of the Institute of Communications was partially destroyed. People were trapped under the rubble. Many were rescued. There are more than 180 injured. At the moment we know of 41 dead. My condolences to all the families and relatives.he wrote on his Telegram account.

According to preliminary data released hours later by Filip Pronin, head of the military administration of the Poltava region, 50 people were killed and 219 wounded. In the evening, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office raised the death toll to 51.

Russia’s official news agency TASS reported that “more than 300 Ukrainian servicemen were killed or wounded when two missiles Iskander-M reached the training center of the Ukrainian army’s communications forces in Poltava. Among them were undoubtedly foreign instructors,” although he quotes an anonymous source from the military environment Russian.

Zelensky offered to carry out a thorough and prompt investigation of all the circumstances surrounding the attack, which, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, occurred by surprise and there was no time to evacuate the people who were in the buildings of the institute.

The time between the sirens and the arrival of the deadly missiles was so short that many were trapped as they ran to the bomb shelters.the military press service said in a statement.

In a clear message to the United States and its allies, Zelensky reiterated that Ukraine Russia urgently needs more anti-aircraft and missile defence systems, as well as long-range strikes that can protect us from Russian terror. Every day of delay (in authorising the use of Western weapons on Russian territory), unfortunately, means the loss of more lives..

What Zelensky did not say is that the educational institution It was one of Ukraine’s leading military academies, training specialists in communications and electronic warfare, and that the dead and wounded were almost entirely officers and soldiers of the Ukrainian army. From the perspective of the Russian Ministry of Defense, it is a legitimate military objective.

These deliberate omissions sparked a wave of criticism of Zelensky on Ukrainian social media yesterday, as his government ignores warnings that maintaining military bases, camps and training centres in densely populated areas far from battlefields puts city dwellers at risk.

Even Amnesty International warned of this danger in 2022 and, instead of gratitude, earned itself an entry into a sort of blacklist, with the consequent government boycott in Ukraine.

Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian military analyst with nearly half a million followers on Facebook, drew a parallel between what happened yesterday in Poltava and other incidents in which the Russian army was able to cause numerous casualties in large concentrations of Ukrainian soldiers, exposed without observing any safety measures, and demanded serious consequences to the person responsible for this being able to happen.

The Ukrainian expert Sergui Sternenko expressed himself in the same vein, publishing on the social network X that The Poltava tragedy could have been avoided if safety rules did not exist only on paper..

The journalist Ilia Ponomarenko asked for the names and surnames of those responsible for any possible negligence on the same social network, stating: Zelensky promised to investigate the tragic incident, but that is not enough. It is not fair to make a statement and have it all happen again. Finally, Zelensky needs to say who allows the Russians to do it again..

The harshest message came from the keyboard of MP Mariana Bezugla, a regular critic of the Ukrainian military leadership: The case of the 128th Brigade (a Russian attack in 2023 in the Transcarpathian region that killed dozens of Ukrainian soldiers hundreds of kilometers from the front) taught us nothing, no one was punished and, as always, Zaluzhny, Pavliuk and Syrskyi (senior military commanders) said it would not happen again. Tragedies repeat themselves again and again. Until when?