At least 10 people were killed and more than 40 others injured in a Russian missile strike on Monday on a shopping center in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, regional governor Dmytro Lounin announced. The toll could be much heavier when this mall was “very busy”, as announced by the authorities.
“Rescue operations continue,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, added on Telegram.
A “crime against humanity”
“The (Russian) occupiers fired a missile at a shopping center where there were more than a thousand civilians. The mall is on fire and rescuers are battling the blaze. The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Facebook. He accompanied his message with a video showing the shopping center on fire, emitting large clouds of smoke, with fire engines and a dozen people on site.
“The missile fire on Kremenchuk hit a very busy place that has no connection with the hostilities”, for his part indicated on Facebook Vitali Maletsky, the mayor of this city which had 220,000 inhabitants before the war. “There are dead and injured. More details will come,” he added. The regional governor, Dmytro Lounine, denounced a “war crime” and a “crime against humanity”, as well as an “undisguised and cynical act of terror against the civilian population”.