The tower is located next to Babi Yar and officials said the bomb hit the territory where the atrocities were committed. Earlier, shelling hit the town of Uman, a significant pilgrimage site for Hasidic Jews.
For many, whether deliberate or not, these strikes exposed the absurdity of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that he launched the war to “denazify” Ukraine.
“Putin seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country,” the Holocaust Memorial Center said in a statement, calling the conflict “utterly abhorrent.” The statement added, “It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest Nazi massacre.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and whose grandparents fought the Nazis, appealed Wednesday to “all the Jews of the world: Don’t you see what is happening?”
He said it was “important that you, millions of Jews, do not remain silent right now, because Nazism is born in silence. So shout about killing civilians, shout about killing Ukrainians.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the strike “evil and barbaric.”
Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust memorial, expressed in a statement its “vehement condemnation” of the incident. The United States Holocaust Museum said it was “outraged at the damage” inflicted on the memorial, which “was the site of one of the largest mass shootings during the Holocaust. It is sacred ground.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid condemned the bombing and called to “preserve and respect the sanctity of the site.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
