The screams from Room 6 could be heard from the hallway. Inside, a 27-year-old cadet thrashed under his hospital sheet, jerking away from the nurses trying to change the dressing on his head wounds. His mom collapsed into sobs. She couldn't listen anymore. Two days earlier, Havryliuk had been a student at a military institute in central Ukraine. Here - more than 100 miles from the front lines north of Kharkiv - his mom thought he would be safe.
By Thursday, the horror in Poltava had sharpened into rage. The search for survivors was over. Doctors at seven hospitals struggled to keep critically-injured patients alive. Families sat on benches outside the morgue, waiting to retrieve the remains of their sons and daughters - some receiving not bodies but blown-apart remains. One of the deadliest single bombardments of the war, the missiles - traveling at 15,000 miles per hour - slammed into the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.
I have never seen this number of injured people at our facility, said Hryhoriy Oksak, 54, head of Poltava Regional Hospital, which received more than 70 victims, the vast majority in critical and serious condition. Not all were expected to survive.
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