Russia killed 41 people in Ukraine in one of the deadliest single strikes of the war

• 41 people are dead after an airstrike on Poltava, Ukraine, its president said.
• Ukrainian officials said two Russian ballistic missiles hit the city.
• The death toll is much larger than in most individual Russian airstrikes on Ukraine.

Russia killed at least 41 people and injured 180 in an airstrike on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday.

Two ballistic missiles struck the city of Poltava, Zelenskyy said, citing preliminary information.

He said that the death and injury figures were also provisional.

They dwarf the scale of Russia's regular missile-and-drone attacks on Ukraine.

The Ukrainian defense ministry said the attack was so deadly because it came without much warning, and struck before people could reach bomb shelters.

Per Zelenskyy, the strike hit the Poltava Military Communications Institute, a medical facility, and an unspecified educational facility.

The Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko shared a video of the aftermath in a post on X.

The Military Institute of Communications released a photo of a mourning candle image in a Facebook post with no statement.

In a Telegram post, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said 25 people were rescued, 11 of whom were under the rubble, and that all victims were given medical care.

Philip Pronin, the governor of Poltava, said in a Telegram post that the region will be in three days of mourning starting Wednesday.

It's difficult to identify definitively the most deadly air strikes of the war — but Tuesday's attack on Poltava is among them.

Early in the war, a Russian strike on a barracks near Lviv was given a death toll of at least 35.

In July of this year, Ukraine said at least 27 of its people were killed in Kyiv. On New Year's Eve in 2022, Russia said a Ukrainian attack on Makiivka in the occupied Donetsk region killed 89 of its soldiers.