The building housing the regional administration in this city near Odessa, in the south of the country, was hit on Tuesday. Two bodies have so far been found in the rubble.
Bombarded since the beginning of the conflict, the city of Mikolaiv has experienced a respite in recent days. But a Russian strike hit this Tuesday morning the headquarters of the regional administration, located in the heart of this city near Odessa, said the governor of this region of southern Ukraine. A strike that would have killed two people according to a first report. “The regional administration building was hit,” Governor Vitaly Kim had previously written on Facebook, assuring that most people inside were unharmed. “We are looking for eight civilians and three soldiers” under the rubble, the official said.
“Right now we are looking. There are no confirmed deaths,” assured Vitaly Kim, stating that “half of the building was destroyed” and his desk touched. He posted a photo showing a building with the middle section partially collapsed. Russians “understood that they will not be able to take Mikolaiv and decided to say hello to me, to say hello to all of us” by bombing the building, Kim believes.
Shortly after the strike, AFP journalists saw two corpses being pulled from the rubble of the building, the central section of which had partially collapsed. They saw shards of glass fly up to the regional veterans office on a nearby street corner, testifying to the violence of the blast.
“I was having breakfast in my apartment, says Donald, a 69-year-old retired Canadian living in Ukraine. I heard a whistle, then a boom and my window was blown out. It’s frightening.” VSThis strike in the heart of the city is also relatively unprecedented. “We were lucky here in Mikolaiv, we didn’t have so many explosions in the center of the city” than in other cities,” says Donald.