How a Russian airstrike ripped through people’s lives in Ukraine’s Poltava

POLTAVA, Ukraine – The screams in Room 6 could be heard from the hallway.

Inside, a 27-year-old cadet thrashed under his hospital sheet, jerking away from the nurses trying to change the dressing on his head wounds.

“I am in so much pain,” Maksym Havryliuk shrieked. “Stop it.”

His mom collapsed into sobs. She couldn’t listen anymore.

Two days earlier, Havryliuk had been a student at a military institute in Poltava, in central Ukraine. Here – more than 100 miles from the front lines north of Kharkiv – his mom thought he would be safe. But then, on Tuesday, two ballistic missiles slammed into the campus less than a minute apart, killing 55 people and injuring 328.

By Thursday, the horror in Poltava had sharpened into rage. The search for survivors was over. Doctors at seven hospitals struggled to keep critically injured patients alive. Families sat on benches in front of the morgue, waiting to retrieve the bodies of their sons and daughters – some receiving only blown-apart remains.

In one of the deadliest single bombardments of the war, missiles traveling faster than the speed of sound slammed into the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology as people tried to evacuate, clogging the corridors and stairwells. In one video of the aftermath, dust-covered bodies are strewn amid the debris, many missing limbs.

“I have never seen this number of injured people at our facility,” said Hryhoriy Oksak, 54, head of Poltava Regional Hospital, which received more than 70 victims, the vast majority of them in critical or serious condition. Not all were expected to survive.

‘Inevitable’

In Room 6, Havryliuk curled on a cot, wedged in with those of three other men injured in Tuesday’s attack.

Seated in his classroom, Havryliuk hadn’t made it to the bomb shelter in time. The blast rolled through him. Bits of metal pierced his skull. A wall collapsed, trapping him.

“The guys who were ahead of him managed to make it around the corner and got (only) concussions,” said his mother, Oleksandra Bystro. “They are not badly injured. The guys who didn’t reach that corner – like my son and some of his fellow classmates – were hurt badly, and some died.”

Havryliuk, conscripted in March, had been taking a six-week course on communications after a heart condition kept him out of combat. Before Russia invaded in 2022, he had studied economics in Sumy and enjoyed fishing. Now, he looked out at his mother through bruised eyes, his head swollen and capped with gauze, clear tubes snaking from his nose. A hole had been drilled into his skull to relieve the pressure.

He was often confused about who was at his bedside, screaming, “Mom, don’t hurt me,” as nurses administered painkillers or changed his dressings.

Dozens of patients were still being treated for severe injuries, Oksak said Thursday. The Post was allowed a rare visit inside the intensive care unit.

After the strike, those most severely injured – amputations, spinal cord injuries, organ failures, severed arteries, punctured abdomens – were brought to his hospital. All nine operating rooms were filled. Surgeries lasted a total of 17 hours, with some victims twice returning to the operating bay. Nearly every patient received a blood transfusion.

Nurses – seeing the number of wounded, their arms and legs cinched with tourniquets – wept in the hallway.

Neurosurgeon Mykhailo Tonchev, 44, tried to focus – spending six hours on one patient’s spinal reconstruction. He wasn’t shocked by the attack. Compared with nearby areas, Poltava had remained relatively untouched by the escalating airstrikes. That this violence would someday arrive felt “inevitable,” he said.

“I felt so sorry for the young boys and girls,” he said, adding that the attack in Poltava served as “proof there is no way to talk to our neighbor.”

He carefully tweezed chunks of metal out of his patients’ bodies, rinsing the shrapnel of blood and saving each fragment.

Survival

Across Room 6 lay Oleksandr Udovychenko, a 39-year-old marketing specialist who had been walking to a meeting when the missiles hit.

His sister, who had just arrived from Poland, held up her cellphone to his face so he could let his boss know he’d survived. He couldn’t remember much – the sensation of falling, the ambulance.

“I open my eyes and I am here,” he slurred, his face badly burned and marked with stitches, his jaw broken, his spine shattered. His unmarked bare feet stuck out from a sheet that came up short.

Udovychenko – whom his partner of two years called “a workaholic” – is a researcher at a local museum and also does advertising for a company that manufactures prostheses. He loves Activia yogurt but only the kind with granola. He has a 7-year-old daughter who adores him.

She didn’t know her father was in the hospital.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” said his partner, Olha Holenko. “He’s dozing, waking up in shock, sleeping only 5 to 10 minutes, 30 minutes maximum. … He’s like a little baby.”

For a moment, Room 6 grew quiet.

A technician in clover-green scrubs pushed a medical device down the hallway. Then the screaming picked up again, louder.

To survive was its own kind of hell.

But death was worse.

‘Unspeakable’

Two miles away – for the second day in a row – Oksana Rychahova, 56, waited on a sun-drenched bench outside the building that held the body of her 32-year-old son.

The hope she’d so carefully cultivated had been lost in several hours. An employee of the institute, her son had lasted one night in the hospital. Despite two surgeries, he had succumbed to injuries “incompatible with life” – a severed femoral artery, broken bones and pulped organs.

He died before he could say goodbye to his 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son.

“It’s an unspeakable feeling for a mother of my age to lose my only son,” Rychahova said.

She kept to herself. She watched the marigolds and asters – growing in a patch of dirt near the entrance – sway in the wind. Around her, families were called into the morgue – its front door open, the smell drifting out.

A man talked on the phone, helping to coordinate the arrival of two soldiers’ bodies from the front lines, inquiring if there was any space left in the packed morgue.

One woman – who had been waiting for more than an hour – received a plastic bag filled with her loved one’s belongings. She sobbed. Two people hugged her as she swayed in front of the house of the dead.

Rychahova barely noticed. She was busy remembering how her son had learned to drive at 10, how he had worked in the family’s transportation business, eventually getting better at the job than his father. His favorite passengers were his pets, Lord the dog and Marquis the cat.

The past was a respite.

A man approached Rychahova and said she would have to come back the next morning to ask about her son’s body. Another day of waiting. It was fine by her. Standing outside the morgue, she felt close to him again.

“It’s like he’s here still.”