BREAKING: Many Causalities As Missile Strikes Busy Restaurant
No fewer than nine people were killed and 56 wounded in a Russian rocket strike that hit a restaurant in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, according to the interior ministry.
Rescue work was still underway Wednesday morning.
Al Jazeera reports that three children are among the victims of the Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk city, as rescue crews combed the rubble in search of casualties.
A second missile was said to have hit a village on the fringes of Kramatorsk, injuring five, but the main casualties were at the restaurant, where at least three children were among the dead.
“Rescuers are working through the rubble of the destroyed building and searching for people who are probably still under it,” emergency service officials said on the Telegram messaging app.
A Russian missile also hit a cluster of buildings in Kremenchuk, about 375 km (230 miles) west in central Ukraine, exactly a year after an attack on a shopping mall there that killed at least 20. No casualties were reported in the latest attack.
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In Kramatorsk, a city frequently targeted by Russian attacks, emergency workers scurried in and out of the shattered restaurant as residents stood outside embracing and surveying the damage.
According to the report, the building was reduced to a twisted web of metal beams. Police and soldiers emerged with a man in military trousers and boots on a stretcher. He was placed in an ambulance, though it was unclear whether he was still alive.
“I ran here after the explosion because I rented a cafe here…. Everything has been blown out there,” Valentyna, 64, told Reuters.
“None of the glass, windows or doors are left. All I see is destruction, fear and horror. This is the 21st century.”
Emergency services posted pictures online of rescue teams sifting through the site with cranes and other equipment.
Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told national television that people were visible under the rubble. Their condition was unknown, he said, but “we are experienced in removing rubble”.
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”.
