The Ukraine Ministry of Defense on Tuesday said Russia had attacked Kyiv’s main broadcasting tower, with videos on social media showing the communications spire consumed in a cloud of smoke.
The Defense Ministry said in a tweet that the attack was carried out so “the enemy can spread [disinformation]” to “destabilize the situation,” and that some television channels were taken offline.
Ukrainian authorities reportedly said the attack on the tower killed five people and damaged a nearby Holocaust memorial site of Babyn Yar, which marked the massacre of nearly 100,000 Ukrainians by the Nazis between 1941 and 1943, including almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv, according to the memorial’s website.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that the Russian attack on the tower and the Holocaust site is “evil and barbaric.”
“Kyiv TV tower, which has just been hit by a Russian missile, is situated on the territory of Babyn Yar. On September 29-30, 1941, Nazis killed over 33 thousand Jews here. 80 years later, Russian Nazis strike this same land to exterminate Ukrainians. Evil and barbaric,” he tweeted.
The attack on the broadcasting tower followed a warning from Ukraine’s Defense Minister posted on Twitter that Moscow is preparing to launch information and psychological operations pushing false claims that the Ukrainian leadership has “agreed to give up.”
“We are in Kyiv,” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted alongside a picture of himself in a flak jacket, surrounded by armed guards, and with what appears to be the Independence Monument in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in the background, along with a Ukrainian flag.
“No surrender! Only victory!” Reznikov tweeted.
Steadfastness by Ukraine’s leaders, in particular Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, is being credited with inspiring morale among the Ukrainian people to push back against the Russian onslaught, which has failed to overrun Kyiv and the country amid five days of war.
Yet the loss of a key communication tower could hurt the ability of the Ukrainian leadership to disseminate truthful information in the face of Russian propaganda seeking to demoralize the Ukrainian people and sow confusion and fear.
U.S. and European allies have praised the tenacity of the Ukrainian military and people to resist the offensive by the Russian army, but have warned Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to increase the scale of violence against the country, with disturbing reports of alleged indiscriminate and targeted shelling of civilian areas.
This story was updated at 3:56 p.m.