The devastating strike launched by Russia on a popular restaurant district and shopping centre in Ukraine has killed at least 10 people, including three children. Two sisters, aged 14 and 17, are reportedly being counted among the victims.
Dog handlers and psychologists are working alongside rescue services, who overnight continued to dig in a bid to save as many people as possible from the rubble in Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine.
The missile launched on Tuesday evening (June 27) by Russian troops hit, among other venues, a pizzeria and a lounge bar called Ria, popular with locals and foreign correspondents covering the ongoing war as well as soldiers from nearby frontlines.
A second missile hit a village on the fringes of the city.
Two kindergartens were also impacted by the shameless strike.
Upon providing an updated death toll, Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region where the city is located, also said one child was among the 60 people wounded.
He added: “The Russians struck with two missiles – one aimed at a private enterprise, the second at a pizzeria.
“The impact completely destroyed the building of the pizzeria, damaged 18 high-rise buildings, 65 private houses, five schools, two kindergartens, a shopping centre, a hotel, an administrative building and a recreational facility.”
Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko lashed out at Russia as he shared on social media what appeared to be pictures of a baby “wounded by fragments” of the missiles.
He went on to claim: “Propagandists on Russian TV justify the actions of the army and claim that they hit a military facility. It looks like a small Ukrainian child is a military facility.”
Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska was also among those who condemned the attack, as she tweeted: “Crowded place, evening – enemy do not want normal life in Ukraine. There are a lot of wounded. It is painful. Evil must be punished.”
Asked about the attack in Kramatorsk, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said: “We condemn Russia’s brutal strikes against the people of Ukraine, which have caused widespread death and destruction and taken the lives of so many Ukrainian civilians.”
British journalist Colin Freeman recalled being at Ria just half an hour before the missiles landed, and shared how being dragged away from his meal due to a work call likely saved his life.
He wrote in the Telegraph: “Somewhere in the middle of that wreckage, which firefighters were frantically hacking through with axes, was the table we’d been sitting at.
“The missile had landed at around 7.30pm – just as we’d probably have been midway through our pizzas, had work not taken precedence.”
Returning to the site after hearing the blast, he even recognised the waiter who had taken his order.
The young man, he said, was “covered in blood and looked badly dazed” but still conscious enough to be able to check his mobile phone.
This attack, the first against civilians carried out by Russia since the Wagner Group’s uprising on the weekend, may be a way for Moscow to “make up for the humiliation”, a senior Ukrainian military source claimed.
