KREMENCHUK (Ukraine), June29 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Exhausted firefighters searched for survivors in the rubble of a Ukrainian shopping mall, where authorities said 36 people were still missing after a Russian missile strike that killed at least 18.
The attack, in the central city of Kremenchuk far from any frontline, drew a wave of global condemnation, with France’s Emmanuel Macron among leaders who called it a “war crime”.
Ukraine said Moscow had killed civilians deliberately. Russia said it had struck an arms depot and falsely claimed the mall was empty.
At a summit in Germany, leaders of the G7 industrialised democracies announced plans for a price cap on Russian oil, a new strategy designed to starve Russia of the resources for war without worsening a global economic crisis.
Next up will be a Nato summit in Spain, at which the Western military alliance is expected to announce hundreds of thousands of troops shifting to a higher state of alert, and overhaul its strategic framework to describe Moscow as an adversary.
Relatives of the missing in Kremenchuk were lined up on Tuesday at a hotel across the street from the wreckage of the shopping centre, where rescue workers had set up a base.
Weary firefighters sat on a kerb after a night battling the blaze and searching for survivors, mostly in vain.
Oleksandr, wetting his face from a water bottle on a bench, said his team had worked all night picking through the rubble.
“We pulled out five bodies. We didn’t find anybody alive,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilians in “one of the most defiant terrorist attacks in European history”.
Russia’s defence ministry said its missiles had struck an arms depot storing Western weapons, which exploded, causing the blaze that spread to the nearby mall. Kyiv said there was no military target in the area, including at a nearby factory that was also hit.
Russia described the shopping centre as disused and empty. But that was contradicted by the relatives of the dead and missing, and the dozens of wounded survivors such as Ludmyla Mykhailets, 43, who had been shopping there 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 at a hospital where she was being treated.
“It was hell,” said her husband, Mykola, 45, blood seeping through a bandage around his head.
Leaders of the G7 countries, 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 statement.
“It’s a question about crimes against humanity,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told Reuters.
“I think it’s like systematical shelling of civilian infrastructure – with what aim? To scare people, to kill people to make terror in our cities and villages.” — NNN-AGENCIES
