KYIV, Ukraine — A shopping center in Ukraine’s central Poltava region was hit by a Russian missile strike on Monday afternoon, the Ukrainian authorities said.
An estimated 1,000 people were inside the building, though the number of casualties is unknown.
“Unfortunately, there are victims,” Dmitry Lunin, the governor of the Poltava region, wrote on Telegram, confirming the attack. “More details later.”
Videos posted online of the site, near the railway station in the industrial city of Kremenchuk, showed a fire raging as emergency workers worked frantically to try to extinguish the flames. Other videos showed injured patients being loaded into ambulances on stretchers.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the site had posed “no danger to the Russian army,” in comments posted to Telegram. “No strategic value. Only the attempt of people to live a normal life, which so angers the occupiers. Russia continues to place its powerlessness on ordinary citizens. It is useless to hope for adequacy and humanity on its part.”
The strike on Kremenchuk came after Russia fired more than 65 missiles at Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday, including a strike in the capital, Kyiv, in which one person died.
An oil refinery in Kremenchuk has been targeted repeatedly by Russian missiles, according to the local news media, part of Moscow’s strategy to destroy the country’s fuel production and storage infrastructure.
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