The attack was part of the Russian military’s attempt to disable a nearby central TV tower, killing five in the process. Jewish groups across the world decried the act, stating that it was “an attack on Jews around the world” and citing that such targeting of cultural property is illegal under Article 38 of the Geneva Convention. The Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the attack an act of “barbarism.”

Ukraine’s Jewish population is technically among the largest in the world and, in the past, has been used as proxies in the Kremlin’s “Fake News”-fueled disinformation campaign to delegitimize the government by associating it with certain factions that prefer a kind of hard-right ultranationalism. 

The monument commemorates a two-day massacre that occurred on the site in September 1941 in which at least 33,700 Jews were murdered by SS men in a gulch north of the city’s center. It already contains a wonderful small synagogue from the Switzerland-based German architect Manuel Herz and was set to grow into a 12-building educational campus administered by the existing center (which similarly condemned Putin’s actions) in the year 2026. 

The loss of life in Ukraine today is our primary concern. We are also outraged at the damage inflicted on the Babyn Yar memorial by Russia’s attack today. #BabynYar was the site of one of the largest mass shootings during the Holocaust. It is sacred ground. Learn more.
— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) March 1, 2022

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had previously remarked he hopes its long-attempted expansion would “create light and hope for the future” at an unveiling of an installation by artist Marina Ambromović to mark the 80th anniversary of the tragedy last year. 

“To the world: what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” he said in a tweet. “At least 5 killed. History repeating…”

Update March 2, 2022: The New York Times reports this morning that the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was not directly damaged in yesterday's strike, but that the building that was intended to be used as a museum sustained damage. “We have to build our memorial, because I understand that in Russia there will be no memorial in Babyn Yar,” the paper quotes Ruslan Kavatsiuk, deputy chief executive of the center.