KYIV - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to respond to a brutal Russian “double-tap” strike on a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, central Ukraine, that killed at least 16 people.
Rescuers have been combing through rubble from Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s hometown, which has been targeted multiple times during the four-year war.
The drone attack, which Zelensky condemned as “cowardly,” came as Ukraine sustains rising civilian casualties due to a critical shortage of US-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the only system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.
“The attack drones struck in two waves: half an hour after the first strike and the resulting fire, there was a second strike targeting emergency responders,” Zelensky posted on Telegram. He warned that Ukraine “will definitely respond” to the attack.
Footage geolocated by CNN shows a drone hitting a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, causing a fireball to erupt into the sky as it explodes, all while smoke from an apparent earlier strike is still visible. Smoke filled the inside of the shopping center as people hurriedly tried to leave, videos filmed at the scene show. Stores inside the shopping center caught fire, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s defense council. Among the 130 wounded, at least 29 are in serious condition, Vilkul said, including a 14-year-old girl with a traumatic brain injury and four other children. On Saturday he warned citizens against visiting shopping centers that are not equipped with shelters, citing intelligence reports that further strikes on such locations are possible.
He urged the public to seek shelter promptly when air-raid alarms are heard, adding that Friday’s siren sounded for 20 minutes before the explosion occurred: “But the shops were open, people were inside them, and very few went to take shelter,” Vilkul said. The strike on the mall happened a day after Russia carried out a large attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, killing at least 17 people, according to Ukraine.
Russia has continued its attacks across Ukraine over the past 24 hours, with strikes reported in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Sumy, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Odesa. At least nine more people have been killed. Ukrainian forces struck two targets in Russia’s Samara Oblast region overnight - the Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery and an Ozon logistics hub, which is a competitor to Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, a frequent target in recent weeks as Kyiv brings the war to Russian soil. Russia’s defense ministry said it intercepted more than 450 Ukrainian drones, while Veniamin Kondratyev, governor of the Krasnodar Krai region, said two children were killed.
Both sides have stepped up their air campaigns as the front lines remain largely static, locked in a slow-moving, deadly stalemate.
Moscow is yet to comment on the attack on the shopping mall directly, but in an interview published on Saturday, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine’s leaders had “themselves let the genie out of the bottle when they started targeting our civilian enterprises.” “They publicly declared their aim: to destroy the Russian economy. Well then – now you’ll get a response,” he said in an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin.
Ukraine sees strikes on facilities like Ozon as a legitimate war of undermining Moscow’s war driven economy.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha again urged allies to provide more missile interceptors and impose additional sanctions on Russia’s military-industrial complex. “Russia must be denied both the ability to produce these means of terror and the ability to use them,” he said.
Rescue teams from seven other Ukrainian regions were urgently deployed on Friday evening to help search for survivors.
The huge fire covering an area of some 9,000 sq m has been extinguished. In an update later on Saturday, Hanzha said that 52 injured people, including 14 children, were still in city hospitals. Dozens of people had already undergone surgery, said Kryvyi Rih’s miltiary chief Oleksandr Vilkul. A day of mourning is being observed across the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Dramatic footage verified by the BBC showed the second drone hitting the already burning shopping centre in Zelensky’s hometown. Russia’s military has not commented.
Vilkul said the drones had been flying at “extremely low altitudes” and described the attackers as “animals”.
Officials have not commented on why Ukraine’s air defence units - which the military says are 90% successful at intercepting drones - failed to stop Friday’s attacks on the shopping centre.
Ukraine’s interception rate of ballistic missiles, however, is much lower - at about 40%, the defence ministry reported in June. Kyiv has repeatedly said it is running low on US-made Patriot missiles - the most effective weapon against the ballistics.
The attack in Kryvyi Rih came a day after 17 people were killed and more than 40 injured in a major Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.
Zelensky said there had been “missile and drone strikes throughout the evening and night” across Ukraine, with residential buildings and civilian infrastructure damaged.
He said one person was killed and another injured after ballistic missile strikes damaged railway infrastructure in the capital Kyiv, while three people were injured by a “brutal” drone strike on a city minibus in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia.
Two people were killed in a separate Russian attack in the Kyiv region, Ukraine’s state emergencies service DSNS said.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said it downed a total of 457 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Two children were killed and two adults injured in a drone strike on a port town in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, according to Governor Veniamin Kondratyev.
In the western Belgorod region two people were killed and 13 injured in Ukrainian air strikes and shelling, acting Governor Alkesandr Shuvaev said.
Ukraine’s military said it had struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region overnight, causing a fire to break out.
Russian online retailer Ozon - the country’s second largest - said one of its warehouses in the region had also been hit for the first time.
This comes after a series of devastating Ukrainian attacks on logistics hubs of the largest retailer Wildberries, known as Russia’s Amazon.
Ukraine has in recent months intensified attacks on Russian energy facilities, as well as on Wildberries warehouses.
Kyiv describes them as legitimate targets because they help finance Russia’s war. Russia has said civilians are being targeted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and currently Moscow controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory in the south-east.