Ukrainian officials said Russian missiles bombarded a shopping mall and nearby sports arena in the country’s heartland on Monday, potentially killing scores of civilians.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the direct hit on the Kremenchuk shopping center, and Ukraine’s state rescue service confirmed that initial reports indicate at least 16 people were killed and an estimated 59 others were wounded in the attack, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Zelenskyy stated in a post on the Telegram messaging app, sharing video that showed plumes of gray smoke rising above a building that was consumed in flames as people and first responders ran in front of it.
The Ukrainian president said an estimated 1,000 people were inside the mall at the time of the attack, NBC News reported.
Images from the scene showed the mall engulfed in flames and giant plumes of black smoke rising from the rubble, “as emergency crews rushed in and onlookers watched in distress,” CBS News reported.
Kremenchuk is the last major city in the eastern Luhansk region still under Kyiv’s control, the Journal reported.
In his Telegram post, Zelenskyy also noted that the mall presented “no threat to the Russian army” and had “no strategic value.”
According to the Ukrainian military, the shopping center was targeted by Russian Tu-22M3 long-range bombers from the skies over Russia’s western Kursk region, CBS News reported.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that one missile hit the mall, while another struck a sports arena in Kremenchuk, according to the network.
While Russia’s Ministry of Defense has not commented on the attack, a senior Russian diplomat at the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, wrote on Twitter that the attack looked like a Ukrainian provocation but did not provide any evidence to support the claim, the Journal reported.
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