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Russian attack on Kramatorsk kills eight

28 June 2023 12:25 (UTC +04:00)

Three children were among the victims of a Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk city in eastern Ukraine that has killed at least eight people and injured dozens more, officials said, APA reports citing Reuters.

Russia fired two S-300 surface-to-air missiles at the city on Tuesday evening, authorities said, with one missile hitting the popular Ria Pizza restaurant in the city centre. A second missile struck a village on the fringes of the city, injuring five.

“As of 07:00 (04:00 GMT) on June 28, the bodies of eight dead people (including three children, two of them born in 2008 and 2011)” were removed from beneath “the rubble of the destroyed cafe building”, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.

Ukraine’s interior ministry also confirmed one of the bodies pulled from the ruins of the restaurant was a teenager, while a baby was among the 47 who were injured.

The restaurant was hit just before 8pm local time (17:00 GMT) when many people were eating dinner.

Emergency services rushed to the scene. Photos showed twisted metal and piles of rubble with rescuers using cranes and other equipment to get to those trapped inside and dozens of volunteers working alongside them.

“There were a lot of people in there — there are children under the rubble,” Yevgen, who had been dining with two friends said.

“We were just about to leave,” he said, but one of his friends was now “under the rubble”.

In tears, a witness Natalia said her half-brother Nikita, 23, was trapped inside. “They can’t get him out, he was covered” by debris, she said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video message that the attacks showed that Russia “deserved only one thing as a consequence of what it has done — defeat and a tribunal”.

Note that Kramatorsk was one home to about 150,000 people and is about 30km (18 miles) west of the front lines in Donetsk province. The city has been a frequent target of Russian attacks, including a raid on its railway station in April 2022 that killed 63 people.