KYIV, Ukraine – A Russian missile attack on Monday afternoon hit a shopping mall in Ukraine’s central Poltava region with an estimated 1,000 people inside, Ukrainian authorities said.
The number of casualties is unknown.
“Unfortunately, there are victims,” Dmitry Lunin, the governor of the Poltava region, wrote on Telegram, confirming the attack. “More details later.”
Videos posted online of the site, near the railway station in the industrial city of Kremenchuk, showed a fire raging while emergency workers worked diligently to try to extinguish the flames. Other videos show injured patients being loaded onto stretchers in ambulances.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the mall “posed no danger to the Russian military,” in a comment to Telegram. “No strategic value. “Only the attempt of people to lead a normal life, which makes the occupiers so angry,” he wrote. “It is useless to hope for adequacy and humanity on his part.”
The attack on Kremenchuk came after Russia fired more than 65 missiles at Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday, including an attack in the capital, Kiev, in which one person died.
According to local news media, an oil refinery in Kremenchuk has been repeatedly targeted by Russian missiles, part of Moscow’s strategy to destroy the country’s fuel production and storage infrastructure.