casualtiger2
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joined Apr 2022
At 10:40, missiles hit a sister city over in Switzerland.
Vinnytsia used to be known as this safe haven in Ukraine—famous for its Zurich-style trams and being tucked far away from the front lines. But everything changed on that one day when Lisa, who was only four, and 27 others lost their lives. What actually happened?
People in Vinnytsia have been hearing that death is coming. Some even caught glimpses of those heavy grey cylinders with colored tips flying right over their heads. Take Olena Danilov, for instance—she runs a humanitarian group delivering milk rations to local hospitals. To her, the sirens were just a brief scare. "Russia won't target our city," she thought—just a little bit of optimism, I guess—"I'll finish my work first, then head to the shelter."
So, you've got a historian like Yevgeny Safarians—the guy who was first to suspect an airplane or a helicopter was involved. Honestly, he probably didn't even see it as a threat at first, since the projectile was coming from the West. I mean, there weren't even any Russians over that way.
Bombs at the clinic.
Turns out they really were Russian missiles. They came in from the southwest, aimed right at Vinnytsia—a city of about 350,000 people in central Ukraine, nowhere near the front lines. Way far from the coast or anything like Switzerland.
At 10:40 AM on July 14, 2022, three Russian cruise missiles slammed into the heart of downtown—right where Times Square used to be the center of all the action. They leveled the local Officers' Club, this old Neoclassical building from the Stalinist era that everyone used for cultural events anyway—definitely wasn't being used for military stuff. The strikes also partially trashed the nearby Jubilee high-rise, which had an ambulance clinic attached, along with some smaller apartment buildings and a whole lot of parked cars.
A missile strike just claimed 28 lives—21 of them died instantly on impact. Among the victims were three kids, ages 4, 7, and 8. Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn't pulling any punches, calling it an "outright act of terrorism." According to the President, Russia is killing American children every single day by repeatedly targeting civilian areas with these missiles.
That shot of Siegesplatza went viral globally. Little Lisa Dmitrieva’s stroller had tipped over onto the ground—she was only four years old at the time. She was out with her mom, heading to speech therapy. Being a little girl with Down syndrome, she had just started finding her voice. You might even remember seeing her on TV—last winter, she was part of that Christmas video produced by the First Lady, Olena Zelenska. Just one face among a crowd of kids gathered around a Christmas tree.
Wiktoria Rekuta, a 35-year-old dentist, and her 7-year-old son, Maxim, are gone. They were at a neurology clinic near Times Square for an appointment when a missile strike hit—now the whole facility is just a charred shell. It’s likely a lot of other victims perished there too, either from the blast or suffocating in the flames.
One of the first eyewitness clips shows thick black smoke billowing out from the building. Two white-and-blue streetcars are idling right in front of a pillar of smoke. One of them even has yellow detailing on the front and a Swiss cross on the back. It’s got "Vinnytsia thanks Switzerland for supporting Ukraine" printed in big letters on both sides of the car.
More than a decade ago, the city of Zurich and the Department of Economic Affairs (Seco) donated over 100 retired trams—mostly the Mirage models—to that Ukrainian city. Fast forward to today, and those blue-and-white cars are still doing the heavy lifting for public transit in Vinnytsia, even with the war going on—at least according to these reports. Over the last ten years, Vinnytsia has become a sort of sister city to Zurich, really setting the standard for cooperation in Ukraine, thanks to a bunch of other aid projects from the bigger city and the federal government covering everything from transit to healthcare and energy.
Now a tram carrying a thank-you note to Switzerland has been hit by the blast wave—shattered glass everywhere. The wreckage is scattered across the floor of a six-line vehicle that used to run between the local train station and the Zurich Zoo. You’ve got shards of glass and two roof caps lying all over the place. Thankfully, no passengers were hurt, which makes sense according to Mikhail Luzenko, the head of the transit authority: "Everyone was evacuated just in time once the air raid sirens went off."
Ten war just won't quit—we’re 140 days in, and ten hours ago, Russian forces launched five Kalibr missiles. They were likely fired from a submarine out in the Black Sea, over 200 miles away. Sergey Morgunov, the mayor of Vinnytsia, said if American air defenses hadn't intercepted at least two of those, things would have been a total disaster. He actually watched one fly past his office window—heard the blast shortly after and realized right then that his city was the target.
Morgunov arrived seven minutes later and was met with pure horror—people running in total panic, others sprawled out on the pavement in Times Square. Some were badly hurt, others weren't moving at all. There were charred cars where firefighters were pulling out blackened remains. First, they had to deal with the fire at the neurology clinic right next to those "Jubilee" skyscrapers. That’s when the mayor saw the bodies being pulled from the wreckage: "I counted five," Morgunov said. "Completely burned."
About an hour later, Olena Danilov showed up at Times Square. The Red Cross sent her out as a volunteer. Most of the victims had been found by then, and the injured were already being rushed to the hospital. But Danilov saw the rescuers—the firefighters, the cops—just completely spent, the shock etched into faces covered in soot and smoke. She started organizing food and water for the first responders. Every shop nearby had been trashed, windows smashed everywhere, Danilov recalls. "But there was this incredible solidarity—we just stepped in and took what we needed to help."
No military presence at the "Officers' Club"
Russia admitted to the missile strike pretty quickly, though they claimed they hit a military target. Right in the middle of Vinnytsia, Ukrainian military officials had supposedly been meeting with foreign arms dealers. Total nonsense, according to Mayor Morgunov. "The Russians hit the Community Center. They were supposed to host a concert there on the evening of July 14th." The building dates back to the 1920s and is called the "Officers' Club," but since the 70s, it's mostly been used for concerts and plays. The only hint of its military ties is the monument out front dedicated to the Air Force—a MiG-21 fighter jet mounted in a metal ring. While the buildings around it crumbled, that monument somehow stayed mostly untouched by the missiles.
Just a few hours before the strike, Vinnytsia was hosting a high-profile guest from Switzerland: Claude Wild, the Confederation's ambassador to Ukraine, was passing through town overnight on July 13th–14th. Wild was en route from Moldova back to Kyiv. This French-Swiss diplomat from a Zurich family knows Vinnytsia quite well—not just because of the blue-and-white trams, which Seco promised to upgrade with 70 newer models last December.
The ambassador had actually sought protection in Vinnytsia before. It was shortly after the war kicked off, when Claude Wild evacuated the last of the Swiss citizens from Ukraine. His convoy stopped in Vinnytsia on the way west, under the protection of Swiss special forces. Back then, the ambassador donated money for children in need. He got to know the mayor well, too. Both men say they've developed a real friendship since then.
In April, Claude Wild returned to distribute food. Switzerland delivered over 1,000 tons to Vinnytsia. The city has become a haven for so many refugees—displaced people coming from the war zones in the East, from Kyiv, and even from the south, from Odessa and Mariupol.
