Emergency services said 20 innocent civilians caught in the blast have died, while 59 were injured and 25 were hospitalized. Another 40 people are thought to be missing, with a further 36 reported to be missing, according to Ukrainian newspaper pravda.com.ua.
Kremenchuk, an industrial city of 217,000 before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, is the site of Ukraine’s largest oil refinery.
“Russian forces fired rockets at the shopping center, where there were more than a thousand civilians,” President Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Monday evening. “The mall is on fire, rescuers are fighting the fire, [and] the number of victims is impossible to imagine.”
News aggregator Visegrad 24 reported that two Russian missiles had struck the shopping mall “in broad daylight”, adding: “There are reports of many people stuck inside in the burning inferno, with desperate screams heard coming from the thick smoke.”
Attempts to rescue those trapped inside continued into the late evening, with journalist Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal stating on Twitter that “the authorities say there are multiple fatalities. [This] May be the deadliest Russian missile strike since the war began.”
Kremenchuk’s mayor, Vitaliy Meletsky, said in a post on Facebook that the strike hit a “very crowded” place and stated that there were “multiple casualties.”
Dmytro Lunin, governor of Poltava Region, on Telegram called the incident, “A crime against humanity. This is an open and cynical act of terror against the civilian population. Russia is a terrorist state.”
Yesterday evening, June 28, President Zelensky posted a new video of the attack, which shows a Russian missile striking the shopping mall, resulting in an enormous fireball. The video is now being widely circulated on social media.
