Russian missile fatally hits Ukraine’s Kremenchuk: 16 killed, 59 injured

 

Kremenchuk: Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, a Russian missile struck a crowded shopping centre in central Ukraine’s Kremenchuk on Monday, killing 16 people.

At least 10 people are missing and 59 people were severely wounded in the deadly strike that took place at a shopping mall near a railway station in the industrial city of Kremenchuk, located in Ukraine’s central Poltava region, the New York Times reported. Condemning the attack, Ukraine’s Interior Minister, Denys Monastyrskyi said in a statement- ‘People just burned alive’.

The strike came after Russia, in a sudden escalation, fired more than 65 missiles at Ukraine over the weekend. Smoke engulfed the surroundings after the missile hit the mall in Kremenchuk as local residents desperately searched for the missing, according to city council officials. Ukrainian officials said that as many as 1,000 people could have been inside the building at the time of the strike, though the exact number was not clear.

Until Monday, the centre of the city had not been hit — Russian forces had only hit industrial targets and an oil refinery. The Amstar mall, located in the city’s centre, is not far from an industrial facility and is believed to be used to repair tanks, the officials added. ‘When they hit infrastructure or factories, we can understand that someone was given the coordinates’, Olha Usanova, a deputy mayor of Kremenchuk, said. “This is just destruction of civilians. I have no words for this horror’.

Earlier, a strike in the northeastern city of Kharkiv killed five people and wounded 22 on Monday, New York Times reported citing local authorities. Quoting the head of Ukraine’s emergency services, Serhiy Kruk as saying ‘So far, 16 people had been killed and 59 injured, 25 of whom were hospitalized’, the media outlet reported. The strike had been carried out by a Russian X-22 missile weighing nearly 2,000 pounds and was fired from Russia’s Kursk region, near the border, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry stated. Ukrainian media reported that 115 firefighters had managed to put out the massive fire and rescuers were continuing to search through the debris for survivors.