Firefighters and soldiers yesterday searched for survivors in the rubble of a shopping mall in central Ukraine after a Russian missile strike killed at least 18 people in an attack condemned by the UN and the West.
Family members of the missing lined up at a hotel across the street where rescue workers set up a base after Monday’s strike on the busy mall in Kremenchuk, in the region of Poltava, southeast of Kyiv.
More than 1,000 people were inside when two Russian missiles slammed into the mall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Photo: AFP / Ukrainian State Emergency Service Press Service
At least 18 people were killed and 25 hospitalized, while about 36 were missing, Poltava Governor Dmytro Lunin said.
Leaders of the G7 major democracies, 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 joint statement.
Zelenskiy in a Monday evening video address said that it was “not an accidental hit, this is a calculated Russian strike exactly onto this shopping center.”
A survivor receiving treatment at Kremenchuk’s public hospital, Ludmyla Mykhailets, 43, said she was shopping 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.
“It was hell,” added her husband, Mykola, 45, blood seeping through a bandage around his head.
Moscow has not commented on the strike, but Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy accused Ukraine of using the incident to gain sympathy ahead of a summit of the NATO military alliance that was to begin yesterday.
“One should wait for what our Ministry of Defense will say, but there are too many striking discrepancies already,” Polyanskiy wrote on Twitter.
The UN Security Council was to meet yesterday at Ukraine’s request following the attack.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the missile strike was deplorable.
Elsewhere on the battlefield, Ukraine endured another difficult day following the loss of the now-ruined city of Sievierodonetsk after weeks of bombardment and street fighting.
Russian artillery was pounding Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk’s twin city across the Siverskyi Donets River.
Lysychansk is the last big city held by Ukraine in eastern Luhansk Province, a main target for the Kremlin after Russian troops failed to take the capital, Kyiv, early in the war.
Eight residents including a child were killed and 21 wounded by shelling when they gathered to get some drinking water in Lysychansk on Monday, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said.
Ukrainian forces still controlled the city, but its loss was possible as Russia poured resources into the battle, he said.
“They really want this and a lot of reserves are being thrown just for this ... We do not need to lose an army for the sake of one city,” Gaidai said in an interview.
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday said he did not take his security for granted, after he was evacuated from his residence for several hours following a bomb threat sent to a Chinese dance group. Albanese was evacuated from his Canberra residence late on Tuesday following the threat, and returned a few hours later after nothing suspicious was found. The bomb scare was among several e-mails threatening Albanese sent to a representative of Shen Yun, a classical Chinese dance troupe banned in China that is due to perform in Australia this month, a spokesperson for the group said in a statement. The e-mail
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
RSS