Six rockets fell on the barracks of a barracks north of Mykolaiv, on the road to Odessa. No official report but it evokes dozens of deaths among the 200 soldiers who were there.
It is probably the deadliest strike of this war. Six rockets fell Friday morning on the barracks of a military barracks north of Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine. No less than 200 soldiers were sleeping in the targeted dormitories. For the time being, no official report has been communicated, the attack has even passed under the radar as it is painful for the Ukrainian army. But according to testimonies collected by AFP journalists on the spot, dozens of soldiers would have perished in this deluge of fire.
“At least 50 bodies have been extracted, but it is unclear how many are left under the rubble,” testifies to journalists Maxime, a 22-year-old soldier. Another speaks of a hundred deaths. The few photos that reach us show bodies sometimes so damaged that they make an exhaustive count difficult. Sometimes it is only limbs, found in the debris, which are covered with a sheet to hide the horror.
According to several Twitter accounts who follow the war in Open Source Intelligence (Osint), that is to say thanks to data gleaned from the internet and meticulously verified, several foreign volunteer fighters were in this military barracks at the time of the strike and could be counted among the victims . One of our special envoys had also followed a convoy of foreign fighters in the region last week.
A strike first passed over in silence
If this were to be confirmed, it would confirm that Russia decides to go after those who come to help the Ukrainians. Like during the bombing of the Yavoriv military base last weekend, just 20 kilometers from the Polish border. The strikes left at least 35 dead and 134 injured, but Moscow boasted of having “eliminated” with these strikes “up to 180 foreign mercenaries and a significant amount of foreign weapons”without this figure being able to be verified.
If the Ukrainian authorities initially remained silent about the strike on the Mykolaiv military barracks, it was because it was necessary to maintain the myth of a city that was almost untouchable, resisting Russian attacks for two weeks now and blocking their passage to the city of Odessa, a strategic port on the western coast of the Black Sea. But such a massacre could not remain invisible for long.
Russians “cowardly carried out missile strikes against sleeping soldiers. A rescue operation is still ongoing., was limited to declaring Saturday morning the regional governor of Mykolaiv, Vitaly Kim, in a video posted on Facebook. Faced with the failure of its ground troops to take the city, the Kremlin applies to Mykolaiv the same shelling campaign already suffered by many Ukrainian cities, first and foremost Mariupol and Kharkiv.