MOSCOW — The youngest among the dead were 18. The oldest, 22. When Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova read out the numbers at a government meeting Sunday, she framed them not as statistics but as a generation interrupted. Twenty-one people killed. Seventy injured in total. Seven still in hospital. Five already discharged.
“Of the number of victims we’ve recorded to date, 70 people, 21 of whom, unfortunately, have died. These were young people between the ages of 18 and 22,” Golikova said at the meeting, which Russian officials described as focused on support measures for victims and the investigation into what Moscow has called a terrorist attack in the Luhansk People’s Republic city of Starobelsk.
The meeting on June 1 came ten days after the May 22 drone strike on the Starobelsk Professional College and its dormitory, which Russia says housed students in their late teens and early twenties. The timing fell on International Children’s Day, a coincidence Russian officials used to amplify international attention on the incident. What remains unresolved is whether Russia’s framing holds up: the United Nations stated it was unable to independently verify the Russian account, and Ukraine’s General Staff has disputed the characterization of the target as a civilian institution.
Ukraine’s military said its drones struck a command post of the Rubicon drone unit, along with ammunition depots and air defense systems in Starobelsk. Russian authorities have described the strike as a deliberate multi-wave attack on a sleeping dormitory. The college is affiliated with Luhansk State Pedagogical University. Russia’s Emergencies Ministry confirmed to TASS that search-and-rescue operations at the site concluded after all bodies had been recovered from the rubble.
What the June 1 meeting added to the established casualty count was the revised figure of 70 total casualties. The gap between that number and the previously confirmed 42 injured reflects a broader accounting of those who required medical attention in any form. How the injury count changed was not explained in dispatches from the meeting.
For survivors with lasting injuries, Golikova announced that the Russian government would organize rehabilitation at federal centers. “For those children who need rehabilitation, we will, of course, organize such rehabilitation and refer them to our federal rehabilitation centers,” she said, using the word “children” despite the stated age range of 18 to 22, a framing consistent in Moscow’s official communications about the attack.
The Starobelsk strike became a pressure point in Russia’s information campaign around the war. President Vladimir Putin called the attack a “bloody crime” and ordered the Defense Ministry to prepare response measures. Russia subsequently conducted what it described as a “massive strike” on military targets across Ukraine, including in Kyiv, using hypersonic and ballistic missiles. Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia raised the strike at the Security Council, accusing Western nations of providing intelligence and weapons that enabled the attack.
Ukraine has not acknowledged striking a civilian dormitory. Its diplomats at the UN called Moscow’s account a disinformation campaign. German authorities summoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Nechaev over Russia’s retaliatory strikes on Kyiv; Nechaev responded by presenting photographs of the Starobelsk site and expressing frustration that Berlin had offered no condolences for the victims.
Ten staff members of the Starobelsk college were subsequently added to Mirotvorets, a Ukrainian state-linked database of individuals designated as enemies of the state. The entries accused the educators of spreading pro-Russian sentiment among minors. Ukraine has not formally distanced itself from the database’s operators.
Golikova’s meeting on June 1 did not settle the central dispute over whether the college was a legitimate military target, but it put a clearer number on the human cost Moscow is willing to place on the record. The investigation Russian officials have described as a criminal inquiry into an act of terrorism is ongoing. No timeline for its conclusion was announced.
Starobelsk is located in the Russian-occupied portion of Luhansk Oblast. The city has been under the de facto administration of the Luhansk People’s Republic since 2022, following Russia’s annexation, a move not recognized by the United Nations or most of its member states.
