At least four people including a child have been killed and 42 injured after two Russian rockets hit a bustling pizza restaurant in the centre of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday.
“Two rockets were fired at the city of Kramatorsk … at a food establishment in the centre of the city where there were a great number of civilians,” said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the eastern Donetsk region.
The missile strike occurred in mid-evening at a popular shopping plaza, raising the likelihood of a high number of civilian casualties. RIA Pizza, the restaurant that was hit, is especially popular among foreign journalists who often use it as an office.
Kyrylenko said authorities would work to establish the number of people killed and injured.
A large crowd gathered at the scene as police officers, ambulance crews and soldiers worked to recover the victims. As many as a dozen people were pulled from the rubble, according to witnesses, but it was not clear if they were dead or alive.
Video from the scene that quickly spread on Telegram showed people injured by the strike lying on the ground being treated, including an infant with a head injury.
One of the restaurant’s cooks, Ruslan, 32, said there were “quite a lot of people” at the moment of the strike. “I was lucky,” he said.
A woman called Natalia told Agence France-Presse that her half-brother Nikita, 23, was inside near the pizza oven.
“They can’t get him out, he was covered” by debris,” she said.
“Russia deliberately targeted crowded areas,” Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Ihor Klymenko, said on Telegram.
Asked about the attack, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said: “We condemn Russia’s brutal strikes against the people of Ukraine, which have caused widespread death and destruction and taken the lives of so many Ukrainian civilians.”
Kramatorsk, once a city of 150,000 inhabitants, is the last major urban centre under Ukrainian control in the east of the country. It lies about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the frontline.
AFP contributed to this report
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