The scene at Babyn Yar: Acrid smoke, uprooted trees – but the memorial still stands

A thick cloud of acrid smoke hangs in the air at the scene of Tuesday night’s Russian missile strike on the Kyiv TV tower, which left chunks of debris scattered across the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial site in the heart of Kyiv.

The complex and the memorial park are separated by a small concrete wall and a narrow asphalt road. While smoke from the attack continues to rise, snow is settling on the grass in the empty park.

There appeared to be no serious damage to the large memorial statue at the centre of the park when Jewish News visited the site on Wednesday afternoon or, thankfully, to the cornerstone near its entrance.

But large chunks of clay bricks had been scattered across a wide area housing the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial site.

The explosion was powerful enough to uproot a tree at the edge of the park, and the smell of burning hangs in the air here, as fresh snow begins to cover the debris.

The scattered rubble fell just short of the marble cornerstone, and the brick fragments were travelling so fast that they tore the bark off a tree that stands less than 10 metres from it. If anyone was in the park at the time, they will have been gravely injured by the thousands of fragments that now lie strewn across the hallowed ground, where 34,000 Jews are buried following the Nazi occupation in 1941.

Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko said on Tuesday night that five bystanders were killed in the blast, which also caused damage to nearby roads and several other small buildings, including a gymnasium equipment store.

Footage was shared on social media last night of the burnt corpses of several people lying on the ground in front of the now destroyed sports shop. All that remains on that site are charred black marks along the street.

Glass and debris fills the streets, cables and street lights have been torn down and lie amid the smouldering wreckage of the attack.

The missile strike itself targeted a building in the communications complex surrounding Kyiv’s main television tower, causing extensive damage to the building itself and the nearby area.

There are no eyewitnesses around, and the only people walking near the site are members of the Ukrainian armed forces and civil defence and other war journalists. Workers have already begun to patch up the damage to the fencing around the TV tower complex.

Leaving the site of the attack, one can see the streets are being further reinforced with barricades and checkpoints, as a column of Russian tanks 40 miles long moves to within striking distance of this city, home to more than 3 million people.

As Kyiv braces itself for what is sure to be another very difficult night, one is left wondering how much worse the Russian war against the Ukrainian people will get, and how many more atrocities are to be carried out on land that has already had far too much blood spilled over it.