A Russian missile took 3 minutes to fly to a military school in central Ukraine earlier this week, killing 54 people.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russian missile that hit the military school in Poltava on September 3 flew for three minutes and many people were killed or injured on their way to shelters.
“It was a missile attack. It is a calculated attack. There is information that the missile flew for about 3 minutes. People did not have time to go to the bomb shelter,” Zelensky told NBC News.
Many of them were injured or killed on the way down to the bomb shelter, meaning people reacted quickly enough, but they were unable to save themselves.”
On September 5, the Ukrainian Emergency Situations Service said that 54 people were reported dead and 297 injured in the Russian attack. They also said that rescuers were continuing search and rescue operations and that five more people may be trapped under the rubble.
The Ukrainian Ground Forces are investigating the attack. Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska said it was Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year. Ukraine accused Russia of using two Iskander missiles in the attack.
Russia later confirmed it had carried out a high-precision attack on a Ukrainian training center in the city of Poltava.
According to Moscow, the facility is home to several foreign instructors who are training Kiev forces in communications, electronic warfare, and drone operations.
Earlier, the head of the pro-Russian government in Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, said the attacked training center was a base for NATO trainers and was used to train Ukrainian recruits.
Ukraine has called on the West to provide more air defense systems to counter the Russian onslaught. Meanwhile, the New York Times said the attack could “demoralize Ukraine”.
Russia has repeatedly accused the West of deploying mercenaries to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. However, NATO has denied the accusations and affirmed that it is not a party to the war.
Russia stressed that under international humanitarian law, mercenaries do not enjoy the same rights as prisoners of war.
In July, Russia announced that its Iskander-M missile system had struck a temporary deployment site for Western advisers and mercenaries in the Kharkiv region, killing about 50 foreign trainers on the Ukrainian side.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, more than 13,000 foreign mercenaries have entered Ukraine to fight on Kiev’s side since the conflict began. As of July, 6,000 of them had died, Russia said.
The Iskander-M battlefield missile system is designed to strike small-sized and stationary enemy targets at a range of up to 500 km, including missile launchers, multiple launch rocket systems, long-range artillery, aircraft and helicopters at airfields, command and communications posts, centers and manpower concentration points.
