As Russian forces continued to lay into Ukraine Tuesday after five days of full-out assault in the country, an apparent Russian airstrike went after the TV tower in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, on Tuesday.
“Just now, a powerful barrage is underway,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s office, said in a statement.
Some television stations in Ukraine were not working after the attack near the TV tower, The Kyiv Independent reported.
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But the hit wasn’t just about communications. The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Site has been impacted as well.
“A missile hit the place where Babyn Yar memorial complex is located,” Yermak added. “Once again, these barbarians are murdering the victims of Holocaust!”
The hit exposes just how disturbed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plot against Ukraine is—in one turn claiming he is trying to “denazify” Ukraine, in another going after a Holocaust memorial.
“Putin seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent,” the memorial’s Advisory Board Chair Natan Sharansky said in a statement. “It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacre.”
The memorial said in a statement it would be submitting evidence of Russia’s war crimes to the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
“We remind the Russian leadership that Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities were last subjected to massive bombing by Nazi Germany during World War II, now they are burning under the blows of Putin’s army, under the false and outrageous narrative of ‘denazifying’ Ukraine and its people.”
The strike killed five, with five others wounded, Ukraine's State Service for Emergency Situations said and Interfax reported.
Some authorities from Ukraine’s government indicated the hit was near the TV tower, or that it had been targeted, but perhaps not directly hit. Ukraine’s parliament said in a statement Russian forces had “fired at” the tower.
“In Kyiv, the Russian occupiers aimed at the TV tower, which is located near the memorial center of Babyn Yar,” Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security said in a statement on Twitter.
The center, housed under Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, is aimed at dispelling misinformation.
Russian forces are continuing to advance towards Kyiv—satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies suggests the Russian military’s column is approximately 40 miles long—where U.S. authorities suspect Russia will attempt to seize the capital.
The news coincides with attacks in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which was rocked with explosions in its main plaza in recent hours, and warnings from Ukraine’s parliament that troops from Russia-backed Belarus had arrived in Ukraine to bolster Russia’s invasion.
Russian forces, though, have “stalled” outside of Kyiv, and essentially haven’t moved in a day, a senior U.S. defense official told reporters Tuesday. The Pentagon warned Monday that Russians are getting “frustrated” with their lack of progress at taking Kyiv, given strong resistance from Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov warned Tuesday that Russia will be running psychological operations and disinformation falsely claiming that Ukraine is capitulating, an effort he said is aimed at degrading the morale of Ukrainians.
But Ukrainians remain fighting for their country, he said.
“We’re in Kyiv! No surrender! Only victory!”
