Ukrainian Military Blocks Reporters From Site of Russian Attack Near Polish Border

A news crew was unable to reach the site of a deadly Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian training center roughly 10 miles from Ukraine’s border with Poland.

The Ukrainian military has blocked off access to the facility near Yavoriv in western Ukraine for miles around, and authorities remain “tight-lipped about the details around the attack,” CNN reported Monday.

“When a CNN team tried to report from the site of the attack, the military had cordoned off the area around 6 miles away from the base. Public access roads leading to the site were blocked. The CNN team saw several people, who identified themselves as volunteer foreign medics, dressed in camouflage disembark from a van near a military cordon,” the cable news outlet said in a written report.

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Ukrainian officials have said at least 35 people were killed and 134 wounded in the attack Sunday. Russia, which is more than two weeks into its invasion of Ukraine, claimed that its forces killed 180 “foreign mercenaries” in the missile strike. Precisely who was killed and injured in the attack remains unclear, though some tabloids in the United Kingdom reported fears that three British ex-special forces troops were among the dead and that the death toll is higher than what has already been reported.

The training facility houses the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security and has been a past venue for training drills with NATO. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said foreign military instructors have worked at the facility but did not disclose whether any were present at the time of the attack.

“Russia has attacked the International Center for Peacekeeping & Security near Lviv. Foreign instructors work here. Information about the victims is being clarified,” he said in a tweet Sunday.

The Pentagon reported that no U.S. military personnel were present when “more than a couple dozen” cruise missiles hit.

“We, the United States, were not involved in any training at Yavoriv after we redeployed the Florida National Guard, and this was, as you know, several weeks ago. There were no U.S. military personnel at Yavoriv. There were no U.S. contractors at Yavoriv. There were no U.S. civilians [in a] government capacity at Yavoriv,” a U.S. senior defense official also told reporters.

Moreover, the Pentagon denied that the training center was being used to transport weapons from NATO. “I would just tell you that we have multiple routes to get secured assistance into the hands of the Ukrainians. This was not one of them,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video message after midnight Monday that NATO territory will inevitably be struck by Russian missiles if the alliance does not implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine.