Russian missiles kill 41 in deadliest strike on Ukraine this year
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00:00On this story we can go across to Gulliver Crag, standing by Gulliver.
00:03What more do we know about this attack?
00:08Well the first important thing to understand is that this Institute of
00:11Communications is a military institute of communications. It's a military
00:16technical college. That building and the adjacent
00:19hospital were apparently the targets of two ballistic missiles that struck
00:23Poltava. Now usually when the Ukrainian
00:26authorities give casualty figures they mean civilian casualties.
00:29So I don't know if those numbers that President Zelensky has given
00:33are the numbers for the civilians who were hurt and there were also military
00:36present and the real number is much higher
00:38or if this time he's actually giving numbers for
00:41military casualties. Though usually the Ukrainian practice is to
00:45not give numbers for military casualties. Already
00:49Russian channels are talking about a great success
00:52and destruction of a very large number of Ukrainian military personnel
00:57suggesting that there was a major Ukrainian military gathering
01:00going on there. No official confirmation of anything like that from the Ukrainian
01:04side but Yuri Butusov who's a very well-respected Ukrainian war reporter
01:09has been writing on telegram that the reason this happened, this is what
01:13he wrote, is that nobody was punished when previously in the course of this
01:17war large gatherings of military personnel
01:20were targeted by the Russians and the lesson was not learned that you
01:23shouldn't get so many soldiers together in one place because
01:27there always might be an intelligence leak to the Russians. But I repeat
01:31that hasn't been confirmed officially but it's a sadly a hypothesis that has
01:35to be taken into account in which case this would be indeed as the Russian
01:39channels are saying one of the largest hits they've ever had in the course of
01:42this war in terms of eliminating Ukrainian military personnel.
01:47Gulliver, thank you very much for that. Gulliver Craig reporting now.