Firefighters and soldiers yesterday searched for survivors in the rubble of a shopping mall in central Ukraine after a Russian missile strike killed at least 18 people in an attack condemned by the UN and the West.
Family members of the missing lined up at a hotel across the street where rescue workers set up a base after Monday’s strike on the busy mall in Kremenchuk, in the region of Poltava, southeast of Kyiv.
More than 1,000 people were inside when two Russian missiles slammed into the mall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Photo: AFP / Ukrainian State Emergency Service Press Service
At least 18 people were killed and 25 hospitalized, while about 36 were missing, Poltava Governor Dmytro Lunin said.
Leaders of the G7 major democracies, at a summit in Germany, said the attack was “abominable.”
“Russian President [Vladimir] Putin and those responsible will be held to account,” they said in a joint statement.
Zelenskiy in a Monday evening video address said that it was “not an accidental hit, this is a calculated Russian strike exactly onto this shopping center.”
A survivor receiving treatment at Kremenchuk’s public hospital, Ludmyla Mykhailets, 43, said she was shopping with her husband when the blast threw her into the air.
“I flew head first and splinters hit my body. The whole place was collapsing,” she said.
“It was hell,” added her husband, Mykola, 45, blood seeping through a bandage around his head.
Moscow has not commented on the strike, but Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy accused Ukraine of using the incident to gain sympathy ahead of a summit of the NATO military alliance that was to begin yesterday.
“One should wait for what our Ministry of Defense will say, but there are too many striking discrepancies already,” Polyanskiy wrote on Twitter.
The UN Security Council was to meet yesterday at Ukraine’s request following the attack.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the missile strike was deplorable.
Elsewhere on the battlefield, Ukraine endured another difficult day following the loss of the now-ruined city of Sievierodonetsk after weeks of bombardment and street fighting.
Russian artillery was pounding Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk’s twin city across the Siverskyi Donets River.
Lysychansk is the last big city held by Ukraine in eastern Luhansk Province, a main target for the Kremlin after Russian troops failed to take the capital, Kyiv, early in the war.
Eight residents including a child were killed and 21 wounded by shelling when they gathered to get some drinking water in Lysychansk on Monday, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said.
Ukrainian forces still controlled the city, but its loss was possible as Russia poured resources into the battle, he said.
“They really want this and a lot of reserves are being thrown just for this ... We do not need to lose an army for the sake of one city,” Gaidai said in an interview.
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