When Nigel Freedman moved to Ukraine’s Kremenchuk seven years ago, the electronics store staff at his nearby mall helped him feel at home.
young, friendly and fluent in English, they advised the technically disabled pensioner from Margate in Kent on how to buy his new mobile phone and TV, eliminating the need to struggle with instruction booklets in Cyrillic.
Yesterday, standing by his apartment block overlooking the mall, he wondered which of them — if any — had survived the Russian missile attack that turned it into 12,000 square feet of charred rubble.
“I go to that mall every day and I know the electrical store staff very well – they help an old man like me with the technical stuff,” said Mr Freedman, 74, who moved to Kremenchuk to be with his Ukrainian wife. to be.
“But I know that at least two are missing.
“It’s terrible — most of the people who worked there were young people in their twenties or thirties.”
At least 18 people were killed and 50 others injured in Monday’s rocket attack on the Amstor shopping centre, which was packed with shoppers.
Ukrainian officials said yesterday that up to 36 more people were feared missing, their bodies burned beyond recognition.
Whatever the final death toll, it is already one of the deadliest Russian rocket attacks on civilian buildings since the war started four months ago.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called it “one of the most defiant terrorist attacks in European history”.
On the scene yesterday, teams of firefighters sat exhausted after working all night to retrieve bodies from the rubble.
Meanwhile, a survivor with peppered shrapnel told from his bed at a nearby hospital how two massive explosions had engulfed the building, setting off a smoking inferno.
“A few minutes before, there was an air raid warning and I got out of the building to smoke,” said Alexander, 33, who declined to give his last name. “The blast threw me under a truck and there was a huge amount of dust and smoke. Only after a while I could see light. I am very lucky to be alive.”
It was not the first time that Russia bombed Ukrainian shopping centers, which it says are used as storage depots for weapons. A shopping center was completely destroyed in Odessa in early May, killing one and injuring six, while another was hit in Kiev in mid-March, killing eight.
However, in both previous strikes in shopping centers, the rockets struck late in the evening when the premises were occupied only by night staff, minimizing the number of casualties to a relative minimum. There was no such caution with Monday’s strike in Kremenchuk, a rough industrial town where the mall is one of the few attractions.
It was popular among locals for its coffee shops, well-stocked deli and the city’s best toy store.
CCTV footage from a nearby water park captured the rocket shaking the neighborhood, with chunks of shrapnel and debris falling into the park’s man-made lake. Passers-by were seen taking cover.
Mr Freedman said that after the explosions, the heat and smoke from the fire made it dangerous for rescuers to get close.
“Many cars in the parking lot started to explode, making it even more difficult for emergency services to do anything,” he added.
Located on the Dnipro River in central Ukraine, Kremenchuk has so far been largely unscathed by the war – hence Mr Freedman’s decision to sit down when the British Foreign Office advised all Britons to leave. But as in many Ukrainian cities, the air-raid sirens still blare several times a day — so much so that they’re often just ignored.
But that could have made the difference between life and death for those at the Amstor mall on Monday.
“I left the mall after hearing the air raid sirens and a few minutes later the explosions happened – if I hadn’t left, I would have died,” said mall worker Daria Yukhno, 25, whose jewelry store had melted. by the heat of the fire. “I think some people just thought it was a false alarm, as usual, and stayed where they were. A friend of mine who worked in a coffee shop has passed away, and many other people I know have just disappeared.”
Svetlana Rybalko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Fire and Rescue Service, said the rocket attack was the worst massacre she had witnessed among emergency services in 21 years.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad things, but this was something unreal – and this was done on purpose. The firefighters themselves are shocked – they hoped to save some people, but the fire engulfed the building in just a few minutes and they found hardly anyone more alive,” she said. “They find body parts that are unrecognizable — we hope they aren’t children.”
Ukrainian prosecutors have described the attack as a “crime against humanity”, and international war crimes investigators have already visited the site.
Within hours of its earlier rocket attack on a Kiev shopping mall in March, the Kremlin promptly produced detailed video footage that shone through its claim that the premises had been used to hide mobile weapon systems.
No such footage had been produced for the Kremenchuk attack since last night.
Moscow claimed the mall fire was caused by a fire that spread from the attack on a nearby Western weapons depot. It also erroneously stated that the mall was empty.
Meanwhile, Mr. Freedman was still anxiously awaiting the news from his friends at the electronics store.
When it finally came through, it was even worse than he had feared: “One is dead, five are in hospital and nine are missing,” he said.