A Russian missile destroyed a busy shopping center in central Ukraine yesterday, continuing Vladimir Putin’s attacks on civilians living far behind the front lines.
The strike appears to be part of an aggressive new Russian strategy.
Over the past three days, its missiles have hit several civilian sites that lie hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s main battlefields, including an apartment building in Kiev.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said there were “a thousand people” at the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchuk when the rocket hit in the middle of the afternoon.
“The mall is on fire, firefighters are trying to put out the fire, the number of victims is impossible to imagine,” he said.
Videos on Twitter showed flames and black smoke billowing from the mall and citizens overwhelmed helping emergency services load people into ambulances.
A fire truck donated by Humberside Fire and Rescue in England used the flames.
In one video, shot from the mall, a man steps over broken glass and rubble to escape a smoke-filled room. For a moment, the camera pans over a small, motionless body.
Kremenchuk mayor Dmitry Lunin said the attack killed at least 10 people and injured 40, but the number is expected to rise.
“A civilian target has been hit in Kremenchuk and there are unfortunately civilian casualties,” he said.
Kremenchuk is an important industrial city with about 220,000 inhabitants on the Dnieper River.
It is the base for a truck factory, an oil refinery, a railcar factory and a hydroelectric power station. Russian missiles have hit and destroyed the oil refinery three times before. The most recent attack was in mid-June.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who attended the G7 summit in Bavaria, Germany, which was dominated by talks on how to support Ukraine, said the attack should bolster the West’s resolve.
“This horrific attack has shown once again the depths to which cruelty and barbarity will sink the Russian leader,” he said.
Over the past three days, Russia has fired missiles at what it has described as legitimate logistical targets in Ukraine.
On Saturday it hit Ukrainian army training centers around Kiev and on Sunday it fired cruise missiles at several other hundreds of thousands of locations from the battlefields of Kharkov and Donbas.
Russia’s defense ministry has said it is targeting infrastructure with high-precision missiles, but it also destroyed an apartment building in central Kiev for the first time since April.
At least two people were killed in the attacks.
Russian President Putin had promised to attack “new targets” after Britain and the US pledged to send new long-range missile systems to Ukraine earlier in June, but Russia has been accused of targeting civilians to undermine morale.
In Donbas, Russian officials said street battles were waged in Lysychansk after Russian soldiers completed their capture of the city of Severodonetsk over the weekend.
“Russians storm Lysychansk and occupied Severodonetsk awaits a humanitarian disaster,” Serhiy Haidai, Ukraine’s governor of the Luhansk region, wrote on Facebook.
Russian troops transported food and medicine for the estimated 10,000 people left behind in Severodonetsk during the battle, but Haidai said this was not enough.
Lysychansk is the last city in the Luhansk region not under the control of Russian forces.
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]