Who died in the dormitory in Luhansk Oblast, hit by a Ukrainian missile? Names of 18 victims already released
The victims are young people from a college. The oldest is 25, the youngest are 19 years old.
On the night of May 22, the Armed Forces of Ukraine struck a number of targets in the occupied Luhansk Oblast.
According to a statement by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the attack damaged "one of the headquarters of the 'Rubikon' unit in the Starobilsk area."
"Rubikon" is a classified unit of the Russian Ministry of Defense that specializes in drones and regularly strikes civilian populations and civilian targets in Ukraine.
However, the Russian side claims that the strike actually hit the buildings of the Luhansk Multidisciplinary Pedagogical College and its dormitory. Media outlets are publishing footage of the aftermath of the attack.
The college is a branch of the Luhansk State Pedagogical University. It trains students in 15 specialties — from cooks and beauty industry specialists to elementary school teachers and computer systems specialists.
Most specialties accept students after the 9th grade. In the Russian education system, this is called "basic general education." In such cases, training takes from 2 years 10 months to 3 years 10 months. This means that if an applicant enrolls at 15 years old, they finish college at approximately 18-19 years old.
For those who enroll after the 11th grade ("secondary general education"), training lasts about 10 months. In such cases, graduates are usually 18 years old.
These calculations are important in the context of the statements made after the attack.
The head of the so-called "LNR," Leonid Pasechnik, reported that at the time of the strike, allegedly more than 80 people aged 14 to 18 were in the dormitory. He also published lists of the deceased, injured, and those whose whereabouts allegedly remain unknown.
The list of deceased includes 17 people. Among them are three young men aged 20-21, the rest are girls, the youngest of whom was 19 years old.
If you search for their pages on social media, you can find most of the young people. Many of them were members of the same Luhansk college community on "VKontakte." Many of the young people were last online on the night of May 22 — the time of the explosion.
The Ukrainian General Staff denies that the target of the strike was the college or dormitory. However, information from open sources, including satellite images, indicates that the attack destroyed the buildings of the educational institution and one of the dormitories.
Ruslan Leviev, founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team investigative group, provides two most probable versions of what happened.
The first is that the college buildings could indeed have housed an object related to the "Rubikon" unit. According to Leviev, the mere fact that it is an educational institution does not rule out the use of its buildings for military purposes.
The second version is an error in target identification. This could mean that the Ukrainian side did indeed aim at a military target, but intelligence inaccurately determined its location.
At the same time, Leviev considers the version of a conscious deliberate strike by Ukraine on an exclusively civilian object with teenagers to be unlikely.
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