LONDON (Reuters) – Thirty-six people were missing on Tuesday the day after a Russian missile fired at a shopping mall in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, which killed at least 18 people.
Firefighters and soldiers searched the rubble for survivors.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that the mall was not the target of the attack, but a nearby arms and ammunition depot whose explosion sparked a fire in the mall.
He further ensures that the structure is disused and that it was empty at the time of the impact. What the Ukrainian authorities and many witnesses who were then doing their shopping deny.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky has accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilians. He claims that a thousand people were in the Kremenchuk shopping center.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova told Reuters another missile also hit a nearby factory, which was closed and not a military target.
“This is a matter of crimes against humanity,” she added.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what it describes as a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The leaders of the G7, meeting at the summit in Germany, described the attack as “abominable”.
“Russian President (Vladimir) Putin and those responsible will be held to account,” they said in a joint statement.
“In Kremenchuk, Russian forces struck a depot of weapons and ammunition received from the United States and Europe with high-precision air weapons,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement posted on Telegram. .
“As a result of this precision strike, Western-made weapons and ammunition…were hit.”
The explosion of this ammunition “caused a fire in a shopping center (…) located next to the depot”, adds the press release.
(Reuters report; French version Alizée Degorce, editing by Sophie Louet)