Last week, Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in a move that shocked the international community. The Ukrainian capital of Kyiv as well as other major cities such as Kharkiv are still under assault by Russian forces.
Early reports of the Russian invasion indicate that they have begun indiscriminate bombing in Ukrainian cities. One report indicated that dozens of Ukrainian civilians were killed and injured in a bombing campaign in Kharkiv.
Russia began intensifying its bombing campaign of Kyiv yesterday after the early phase of its assault was benign, according to military experts. After bombing a communications tower in the capital, Russia began droppong bombs on a holocaust memorial, damaging a Jewish cemetary that was built to mourn over 30,000 holocaust victims in the country. The Associated Press Reports–
“Holocaust remembrance organizations in Israel are condemning a Russian attack that inflicted damage to the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a statement denouncing the incident, and said Israel would help repair any damage. “We are calling for the preservation and respect for this sacred site,” he said in a tweet that did not mention Russia by name.
The memorial is the site of a massacre of more than 33,000 Jews by Nazi Germany in 1941. It is located on the outskirts of Kyiv and adjacent to the city’s TV tower, where Ukrainian authorities said a Russian attack killed five people.
A spokesman for the memorial said that damage was caused to the Jewish cemetery at the site, but that assessing the full extent of the damage would have to wait until daylight.
The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial’s chairman, Natan Sharansky, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent. It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacres.”
The Russian government claims that one of its goals in the invasion of Ukraine is to ‘de-nazify’ the country.
