Ukraine has again paid a heavy price in the Russian invasion, with several strikes affecting civilians, including one which left "more than 20 dead" according to the authorities in Kremenchuk (center) and nearly 60 wounded, on Monday June 27 2022. Russia on Tuesday denied hitting a crowded shopping center in Ukraine the day before, claiming that a disused shopping mall had caught fire after a targeted strike against an arms warehouse.
She also said she was aiming for the capitulation of Ukraine, NATO having denounced the "brutality" of Moscow on the first day of a crucial summit in Madrid.
The point on this attack in pictures.
Directed by:
Olivier JUSZCZAK
This city in central Ukraine had some 220,000 inhabitants before the war and had so far been spared the bombardments.
“The occupiers fired missiles at a shopping center where more than a thousand civilians were.
The mall is on fire and rescuers are battling the blaze.
The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Facebook.
"After a quarter of an hour, everything had already burned down and there were a lot of people, it's horrible," said Antonina Choumilova, who runs a beauty salon opposite the shopping center, referring to the victims.
In a fire at very high temperatures like this, fire commander Ivan Melekhovets told AFP, “you have no chance of surviving”.
"The hardest thing is to see the corpses, adults, children," adds this firefighter who took part in the rescue operations on Monday.
"Now we are working to find people who are missing, between 50 and 60," he said.
Clearing operations were halted for more than an hour on Tuesday when shelling sirens sounded.
The neighbors of the "Amstor" shopping center reject the version of the Russian army which claims to have hit a nearby military warehouse.
The Russian Ministry of Defense in its daily press release claimed to have destroyed with “high precision” missiles warehouses of armaments delivered by Westerners which were located on the territory of a construction vehicle factory adjoining the shopping center.
“We heard that, it's nonsense.
When you live here, I wonder how you can believe such things that are pure invention, "reacts Polina Pushintseva, who lives on the fourth floor of a building located opposite the "Amstor" center, when questioned. on the Moscow version.
A ten-minute walk from Amstor is a factory that manufactures construction machinery.
It was visited on Tuesday by AFP journalists, who were able to see that the establishment was intact and that no military equipment was seen there.
The Ukrainian military claimed that the mall was hit by anti-ship missiles fired from Tu-22 long-range bombers from Russia's Kursk region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded on Tuesday that Russia be recognized as a "State sponsor of terrorism", the day after the Russian strike that killed "more than 20 people", according to kyiv.
Russia said on Tuesday it was aiming for Ukraine's capitulation, as NATO denounced Moscow's "brutality" on the first day of a crucial summit in Madrid.
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