Russian missiles hit shopping centre killing 10 and several others injured in central Ukraine

Russian troops struck a shopping centre in Kremenchuk in the Poltava region with at least two missiles on Monday afternoon with over a thousand people inside, Ukrainian authorities claim.

Dmytro Lunin, head of the Poltava regional administration reported at least 10 people were killed in the strike while some 40 were injured.

Earlier, at least nine victims of the missile strike were said to be in critical condition. The total number of casualties is expected to grow further.

Footage and images from the scene show that the entire shopping centre was engulfed in the blaze, with emergency crews and passers-by trying to help the victims.

“The mall is on fire, firefighters are trying to extinguish the fire, the number of victims is impossible to imagine,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated on his Telegram account.

The attack was reminiscent of earlier strikes against civilian targets since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, such as the air strike on the Drama Theatre in the eastern port city of Mariupol in March, killing an estimated 600 of the people sheltering there.

The Amstor shopping centre was “no threat to the Russian army” and had “no strategic value”, Zelenskyy said, adding that the aim of the attack was to undermine “people’s attempts to live a normal life, which make the occupiers so angry.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said on Twitter that Russian troops “deliberately hit [the] shopping centre … just because [they] want to kill,” calling Russia “a terrorist state.”

The strike on Kremenchuk, an important industrial city in central Ukraine and home to its biggest refinery, came a day after Russian missiles hit a residential area of the capital Kyiv.

The city of about 220,000 is also a major railroad juncture and the site of a Roshen confectionery factory, owned by former President Petro Poroshenko.

Many believe that attacks on targets in other regions of Ukraine far from the frontline in the Donbas represent an escalation by the Kremlin, which has focused solely on the eastern region in recent months.