Russian strike near Kyiv's Babyn Yar memorial revives echoes of the 1941 Nazi massacre

On Tuesday, two rockets struck a television tower in Kyiv, close to Babyn Yar, the ravine on the city's northern edge where Nazi forces carried out one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, as relayed by Reuters, said five people who were walking nearby were killed. He urged residents to stay off the streets because of the continuing threat of attack.

The site carries a specific history. On 29 and 30 September 1941, after the German army entered Kyiv, the city's Jews were told to gather near a train station for resettlement. Crowds were instead forced to undress and assembled at the ravine, where they were shot. The toll over those two days was 33,771 people, more Jews than in any other single German massacre. Over the course of the war the Nazis wiped out nearly the whole Jewish population of Kyiv. According to Britannica, Babyn Yar kept being used as an execution site, for Soviet prisoners of war and for Roma as well as for Jews.

The killings were recorded by eyewitnesses and depicted in novels by Ilya Ehrenburg (The Storm, 1948) and Anatoly Kuznetsov (Babi Yar: A Documentary in the Form of a Novel, 1967). Non-Jewish eyewitness accounts appear in a 1991 volume edited by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess. The massacre was led by paramilitary officer Paul Blobel, who was convicted and executed after one of the Nuremberg trials.

Remembrance came slowly. For 25 years after the war the Soviet Union barely acknowledged Babyn Yar. A small obelisk went up in 1966, and a 50-foot memorial statue followed in 1974. Peter Hayes, professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, told the New York Times that the site began to be treated as a formally recognized landmark only after Ukrainian independence in 1991. Last year, on the 80th anniversary, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unveiled a modern art installation there.

Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, responded on Twitter soon after the strike. He asked what the point was of saying "never again" for 80 years if the world stays silent when a bomb falls on the same site, noted at least five dead, and wrote that history was repeating. Ukraine's foreign ministry said Russian troops had fired on the tower near the memorial complex. Andriy Yermak, the president's chief of staff, was quoted by the Times of Israel as saying that these barbarians were once again murdering victims of the Holocaust.

Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, called it symbolic that Vladimir Putin began attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the biggest Nazi massacre. He referred to Putin's claim before the invasion that he was acting partly to "denazify" Ukraine, and called Putin's use of the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country utterly abhorrent. Sharansky, who was born in Ukraine, said the center, built on Europe's largest Holocaust mass grave, works to preserve memory after decades of Soviet suppression of the truth, and that truth must not again become a casualty of war.

Israel's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre voiced "vehement condemnation" of what it called a deadly Russian attack near the memorial site, though Israeli government statements did not name Russia. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called for the sanctity of the site to be preserved and honoured, and expressed sorrow for the loss of life since the invasion began the previous week.

The strike is part of a wider pattern the report describes: Russian attacks damaging not only lives and buildings but historical monuments and museum artworks. Whether further cultural sites are hit is the thing to watch.