Officials at the Russian embassy in Ireland have denied yesterday’s devastating airstrike on a Ukrainian shopping center.
A Russian missile destroyed the shopping center in Kremenchuk, killing at least 16 people. The search for victims and survivors is still ongoing.
The attack appears to be part of an aggressive new Russian strategy to deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
Over the past three days, Russian missiles have hit several civilian sites that lie hundreds of thousands of Ukraine’s main battlefields, including an apartment building in Kiev.
Yesterday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky 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.
However, in a statement released this morning, the Russian embassy in Ireland claimed that “Russian aerospace forces” had carried out a “high-precision” attack on a weapons storage facility and, as a result, a “non-functioning shopping center” adjacent to the facility was caught fire.
The statement read: “On June 27, in the city of Kremenchug, in the Poltava region, the Russian Air Force carried out an attack with high-precision air-launch weapons on hangars storing weapons and ammunition used by the Ukrainian military from the United States and European countries, in the area of the vehicle factory in Kremenchug.
“As a result of a high-precision strike, western weapons and ammunition concentrated in the storage area for onward shipment to the Ukrainian troop group in Donbass were hit.
“The explosion of stored ammunition caused a fire in a non-functioning shopping center next to the factory.”
The statement is the latest in a series released by the Russian embassy that denies atrocities widely verified by EU officials and media outlets on the ground in Ukraine.
Calls have been made for the Irish government to expel Russian diplomats, including Ambassador to Ireland Yuri Filatov, since the Ukrainian invasion began in February. The Russian embassy, on Dublin’s Orwell Road, has also been the scene of rolling protests.
In recent months, Ambassador Filatov has denied that Russian forces were responsible for civilian casualties and has accused Ukrainian leaders and their Western allies of organizing atrocities.
In his most recent statement, at the end of May, Ambassador Filatov Taoiseach accused Micheál Martin of trying to blame Moscow for energy and food crises.
“All of this, in turn, they are now trying to portray as Russia’s responsibility. It is the responsibility of the West and it will have to face the consequences of its shortsightedness. Unfortunately, it may be slow to get going – the results of the EU summit point once again to the acute lack of common sense and rationality among European political leaders,” he said.