No time to run: Russian missiles hit Ukraine city just after sirens sound

Russian missiles struck a military academy in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday only minutes after air-raid alarms blared, killing more than 50 people, wounding many others and underscoring Moscow’s superior firepower in one of the war’s deadliest attacks. Ukraine’s president said a hospital was also hit.

Rescue workers in the eastern city of Poltava described scenes of dismembered bodies pulled from the rubble of the school, which Ukrainian news outlets identified as the Poltava Institute of Military Communications.

The entire area was littered with shattered glass, with nearby high-rises missing windows and doors. By some accounts more than 200 people suffered injuries, overwhelming hospitals.

Denys Kliap, the 26-year-old director of Free and Unbreakable, a volunteer emergency response team, was asleep when the first blast rocked him out of bed. “As soon as it happened, we went straight to the site,” Kliap said. “When we arrived, the only thing I remember was the pile of bodies scattered all over the territory of the institute.”

While he has seen many horrific scenes, the devastation after Tuesday’s strikes was shocking, he said. He recalled bodies being pulled from the rubble “without legs, others without arms, some even without heads.”

The strike was a demoralizing blow to Ukraine, coming as its troops have been retreating from relentless Russian advances along the war’s main front in the Donbas region.

“Russia is taking away our most valuable asset, our lives,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said of the missile strike.

The attack Tuesday extended a wave of Russian assaults on cities across Ukraine that began a week ago and that have been among the largest since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the strike had been carried out with ballistic missiles, which can travel at supersonic speed and reach a target anywhere in Ukraine in a matter of minutes.

Ukraine has pleaded since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 for more tools to defend its skies from Russian missiles, and on Tuesday Zelenskyy took to social media to issue a fresh request for more aid. “Ukraine needs air defense systems and missiles now, not sitting in storage,” he wrote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Mongolia on Tuesday, some 3,000 miles from the front lines of the Ukraine war. He said nothing in public about Ukraine, according to Kremlin transcripts of his remarks.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.