Scenes of Carnage After Russian Attack on Ukrainian Military Academy and Hospital

Rescue workers from the State Emergency Service were already on the scene, desperately searching for survivors, when Denys Kliap arrived. They were pulling bodies from the rubble “without legs, others without arms, some even without heads,” he said.

Shattered glass was everywhere. Nearby buildings showed gaping holes where windows and doors had been blasted off.

Mr. Kliap, the 26-year-old director of Free and Unbreakable, a volunteer rapid response team in the eastern Ukrainian city of Poltava, had seen many such scenes of carnage. But the devastation of the strikes on Tuesday still shocked him.

“When we arrived, the only thing I remember was the pile of bodies scattered all over the territory of the institute,” he said.

Russian missile strikes on a military academy and a neighboring hospital in Poltava, about 100 miles from the Russian border, had residents scrambling to reach shelters on Tuesday, often unsuccessfully, with many reporting that sirens sounded only very shortly before the attacks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes had been carried out with ballistic missiles, which can travel at supersonic speed and reach a target anywhere in Ukraine in a matter of minutes.

“Unfortunately, there was not enough time for all the people to run to the shelter,” said Markiyan, 25, a young soldier who asked not to be identified by last name and said he was inside a building in the complex of the military training institute that was hit. “There was too little time between the air raid alert and the first strike,” he said.

Markiyan, who appeared to be in shock and had minor shrapnel wounds on his hands and face, said the strikes hit in rapid succession, shortly after air raid sirens sounded, and that people were sprinting to bomb shelters. “After the first strike, I was blown under the stairwell by the shock wave,” he said. “When I was trying to recover and continue to take cover, the second strike occurred.”

The soldier struggled to express and formulate his thoughts, mentioning that many of his friends remained trapped under the rubble. But his account of the timing echoed those of others in the city, like Olena Serdyuk, who told the BBC: “The air raid alert started in just a minute, and then there were two explosions.”

The strikes on Tuesday left more than 50 people dead and more than 200 injured. It was the latest in a string of deadly Russian attacks.

Air raid sirens continued to sound as emergency crews worked at the site of the strikes late Tuesday. Images from the scene showed buildings at the military institute gutted but still standing.

In the block where the military institute stands, mobile air defense units were stationed, ready to shoot down any additional aerial threats that might target the complex again.

Just after the missiles struck, there were reports in the Ukrainian media that cadets had been lined up outside the military school. Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed occupation official in southern Ukraine, also claimed that the missiles hit cadets gathered for an event. But a spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry, Dmytro Lazutkin, denied on national television that the victims were participating in a parade or ceremony, saying that classes were underway when the air raid sirens sounded.

Mr. Kliap said in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening that it did not appear to him that there had been some sort of gathering at the military institute at the time of the strikes because the victims he saw at the scene were spread over a wide area. He noted that it appeared a number of victims were caught in the blast as they raced to the shelter. “I doubt it was a gathering,” he said. “And from what we’ve heard, everyone says there wasn’t one.”

With more than 200 people injured, he said, the local hospitals were overwhelmed.

“The hospitals are full,” he said. “All the doctors who were on vacation have returned to work because the situation is very critical.”

After the first chaotic hours following the attack, when his team helped emergency workers tend to the wounded and pull the dead from the ruins, Mr. Kliap said he spent the evening helping civilians living nearby board up windows blown out by the blast, and providing assistance to particularly vulnerable people whose homes had been struck.

“We are providing temporary help to allow them to sleep at night, prevent rain from coming in, and avoid further consequences,” he said.

They also brought about 300 meals for emergency crews as they worked late into the night

“It was very terrifying,” Mr. Kliap said, describing what he’d seen in his city that day. “We’ve never seen anything like this in Poltava before.”

But Poltava is no stranger to war, historically, and the strike in the city has a particular resonance for Russia. It is the site of a consequential battle in 1709 between Sweden and Russia — with Ukrainian factions joining both sides — that marked the start of Russia’s dominance in the Baltic region and dashed the dreams of Ukrainian nationalists of the time who had sided with Sweden.

Poltava was largely destroyed in World War II, and the modern city has in great part been reconstructed since. It’s now home to about 450,000 people, according to local authorities, and is a hub of tech development.

In a note offering condolences to the relatives of the dead in Tuesday’s strike, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, wrote, “Russia is taking away our most valuable asset, our lives.”