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Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday that Russian forces launched a strike on the Kiev TV tower as well as the country's main Holocaust memorial, among other civilian sites hit on the sixth day of the confict.
Ukraine’s State Service for Emergency Situations said the strikes on the TV tower killed five people and left five more wounded.
The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, posted a photo of clouds of smoke around the TV tower and Mayor of Kiev Vitali Klitschko shared a video of it being hit.
Mr Klitschko said an electrical substation powering the tower and a control room at the tower were damaged in the strike.
The head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, Andriy Yermak, said on Facebook that a “powerful missile attack on the territory where the [Babi] Yar memorial complex is located” is under way.
Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev, is where about 34,000 Jews were killed over the course of 48 hours in 1941 when the city was under Nazi occupation. The killing was carried out by SS troops along with local collaborators.
Holocaust remembrance organisations in Israel have condemned the Russian attack that inflicted damage to the memorial.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a statement denouncing the incident and said Israel would help repair any damage.
“We are calling for the preservation and respect for this sacred site,” he said in a tweet that did not mention Russia by name.
A spokesman for the memorial said that damage was caused to the Jewish cemetery at the site but that assessing the full extent of the damage would have to wait until daylight.
The memorial’s chairman, Natan Sharansky, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent”.
“It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kiev by bombing the site of the Babi Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacres,” he said.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, expressed “vehement condemnation” and called on the international community to take action “to safeguard civilian lives as well as these historical sites”.
“Rather than being subjected to blatant violence, sacred sites like Babi Yar must be protected,” it said.
