The Russian missiles that tore into a Ukrainian military academy on Tuesday proved so lethal because cadets had barely two minutes to seek safety in a bomb shelter and because debris from explosions then blocked emergency exits, the academy director said Wednesday.
The director, Ihor Matsiuk, said that the strike on the academy, in the eastern city of Poltava, happened as lessons were in session and most of the cadets were in class. Many students in classrooms near the shelter survived, while those farther away suffered a higher toll in dead and wounded, Mr. Matsiuk said at a news conference.
Two of six emergency exits were blocked, he said, while interior corridors that students might have used for escape collapsed.
When the air alarm sounded, “everyone started running to the shelter,” said Andriy, a cadet who was interviewed at a hospital as he visited wounded friends and who asked to be identified only by his first name. He reached the shelter just as there was “a terrible roar and the ground shook,” he said, adding somberly, “I managed to get into the shelter, unlike others.”
Within seven minutes of the alarm’s sounding, the academy had evacuated more than 1,000 people, Mr. Matsiuk said.
By late Wednesday, the death toll had risen to 53, with 297 people wounded and five missing and believed to be under the sprawl of bricks and beams at the site, emergency workers said. A medical clinic that was part of the military complex was also damaged.
Ukraine’s Parliament plans a hearing on Thursday to investigate of the strike. But the attack highlighted Ukraine’s challenge of preparing soldiers to wage war, because any gathering of soldiers, even far from the front lines, becomes a target.
A top lawmaker said that having so many military personnel in a single known location, vulnerable to ballistic missiles that fly at many times the speed of sound, raises questions for Ukrainian military’s leadership.
“Military education was taking place in a building everybody knew about,” the lawmaker, Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Parliament and a colonel in the Ukrainian Army, said in an interview. “That is the biggest problem.”
Already in the war, he said, soldiers have been killed by missile strikes on barracks at bases used for years. Closer to the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers fan out, often living in abandoned houses in villages.
Andriy, the cadet at the hospital, and two other cadets said no students were standing at formation or gathered for a ceremony before the strike.
Russian missile strikes can be capricious, sometimes hitting with precision and lethal effect and other times straying from targets, merely gauging gaping craters in parking lots or fields.
Since Russia began an intensified barrage of long-range strikes on Ukraine nine days ago, hundreds of missiles and drones have streaked into the country. A strike on the western city of Lviv on Wednesday killed seven people, including four members of one family. None were as deadly as the attack on Poltava.
The rescue operation in the city Tuesday night and Wednesday was gruesome and exhausting as emergency workers covered in dust pulled bodies, some missing limbs, from the rubble. The work was interrupted by 13 air-raid alerts on Tuesday and Wednesday as Russia sent jets into the air that could have fired missiles; activity from Russian planes sets off alerts even if no missiles are fired.
A firefighter who asked to be identified only by his first name, Dmytro, said the repeated alerts had slowed the rescue effort but that he and his colleagues had learned to work while frequently leaving the site for short periods in case of a repeat attack. “We do this often,” he said.
Hospitals filled with wounded. At the Sklifosovsky regional hospital, a tearful mother tried to see her son in the intensive-care ward but was told his condition was too unstable for a visit. People moved in and out of the hospital, their voices trembling as they delivered news to their relatives by phone. “He is screaming of pain,” one mother said.
Emergency workers rescued a young woman still alive under the rubble around noon on Wednesday. It was more than 24 hours after the missile strike, when the chances of finding people alive diminish. An ambulance brought her, unconscious and bruised, to the hospital.
Hundreds of people turned up to donate blood, forming a long, snaking line under walnut trees in a hospital yard. On Wednesday, 255 people donated to the local blood center, said Volodymyr Rudikov, the chief doctor there, and Poltava hospitals were fully supplied with blood.
In the minutes after the explosion on Tuesday, Valeria Nor, 32, raced to a kindergarten near the military installation to check on her 3-year-old daughter. In the neighborhood around the school, she said, soldiers and cadets had spread out, some drenched in blood.
They bandaged one another’s wounds, and residents helped, she said. Some soldiers had blood coming out of their ears.
Ms. Nor’s husband, a doctor, ran to treat the wounded while she bought water and juice for the shocked cadets.
“At the beginning of this war, we thought we would take the children and run if there were just one bang nearby,” she said. “But we didn’t run. We came to the epicenter to help.”
In the hospital on Wednesday, the parents and a friend of a wounded soldier waited for news of his condition.
“I don’t know what his injuries are,” said the soldier’s mother, who gave only her first name, Natalia. “The main thing is that he is alive.”
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