New Phase of Russia's Assault on Ukraine

By Mykhailo Bondarenko | Tuesday, 01 March 2022 02:20 PM

Russia bombed Kyiv's telecommunications tower, which is located in Babi Yar, a Holocaust memorial center, on Tuesday.

This is one of the many attacks on militarily useless but culturally significant centers and marks a new phase of the war.

Babi Yar is a ravine in Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, and a site of a miner of massacres done by the Nazi regime during World War I. In two days — Sept. 29 and 30, 1941 — Nazis murdered 33,711 Jews. It was the largest single massacre of the Soviet campaign.

A week ago, it was a peaceful, quiet neighborhood spot for families to enjoy. The ravine landform makes it a perfect place for sledging.

Now, it's lined with bodies. According to the latest information from Ukraine’s Emergency Services Facebook page five people were killed in the Russian airstrike. The telecommunications tower remains intact.

"These villains are killing Holocaust victims for the second time," said Andriy Yarmak, the chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office.

Ukraine's key cultural infrastructure has been targeted with increasing frequency as Russia enters a desperate stage of war that it thought it would win within hours.

Earlier today the massive office of Kharkiv's regional administration was decimated by a missile strike that killed seven reported so far. It’s located in one of Europe’s biggest squares, ironically called "Freedom Square." An opera house, a philharmonic orchestra, and 4-5 residential buildings were also hit during today’s Kharkiv raid.

On Monday, a nearly 1,000-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral was targeted, according to a telegram post from the ministry of culture. The cathedral is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Ukraine’s security services caught a group of saboteurs who were placing fluorescent markers that glow under UV light exposure, a strategy Russia has been using to target civilian infrastructure during the conflict. The head of the Ukrainian church was targeted too.

A day earlier, the world's biggest cargo plane was destroyed. It’s Ukrainian-built, holds records for its freight-carrying capabilities and is the pride of Ukraine’s engineering. It appears in Ukrainian history textbooks and is one of the many national symbols of a modern, independent Ukraine.

Mykhailo Bondarenko is a Ukraine-born writer based in New Orleans. © 2022 Newsmax. All rights reserved.