As Russia continued its assault on Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv on Wednesday, a missile hit a part of Karazin National University. It was seemingly intended for the neighbouring police headquarters or interior ministry, but it struck the college’s faculty of sociology instead.

Among the many people who had shared visuals of the burning building were journalists Leonid Ragozin and Hanna Liubakova. Built in 1805, Karazin National University is one of the first universities set up in Soviet empire, Ragozin pointed out before hitting out at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I interviewed a pro-Russian academic here in 2014. Putin is now destroying ‘Russian world’ he is claiming to protect,” he tweeted.

According to the Karazin National University’s website, it was the second university to be set up in the south of the Soviet empire in 1805. It was founded by a local community with Russian intellectual and inventor Vasily Karazin at the front. The university was then named Imperial Kharkov University.

On October 11, 1999, the then President of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, issued a decree in which he took into account the “considerable contribution” of the university in training specialists and in the field of science, and granted it the status of a national university.