Death toll rises to 10 in Russian attack on Ukraine's Kramatorsk

[June 28, 2023]   By Max Hunder
 
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (Reuters) -The death toll rose to 10 on Wednesday from a Russian missile strike on a crowded restaurant in Ukraine's eastern city of Kramatorsk the previous evening, with two more bodies including a fourth child pulled out of the wreckage.

Rescues and volunteers carry a woman rescued from the debris at the site of hotel and restaurant buildings heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in central Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine June 27, 2023. REUTERS/Oleksandr Ratushniak

Police said at least 61 people were wounded in Tuesday's missile strike, which turned the restaurant into a pile of twisted beams.

"As of now, rescuers have recovered the bodies of 10 people from the rubble," Veronika Bakhal, spokeswoman for the Donetsk region emergency services, told Ukrainian television.

Eight people had been rescued alive from the rubble and at least three more were believed to be trapped, she said.

Kramatorsk mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko posted on the Telegram messaging app that the body of a boy had been pulled out. He did not give the boy's age. The dead confirmed on Tuesday included two 14-year-old sisters and another girl, 17.

"I ran here after the explosion because I rented a cafe here.... Everything has been blown out there," said Valentyna, a 64-year-old woman who declined to give her surname.

"None of the glass, windows or doors are left. All I see is destruction, fear and horror. This is the 21st century," she told Reuters.

During the overnight rescue, 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. Two men screamed in frenzied tones for a tow rope, then ran back towards the rubble.

A second missile hit a village on the fringes of Kramatorsk, wounding five.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video message on Tuesday that the attacks showed Russia "deserved only one thing as a consequence of what it has done -- defeat and a tribunal".

Russia has frequently hit Ukrainian cities since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. It denies intentionally targeting civilians.

Kramatorsk lies west of front lines in Donetsk province and would be a likely objective in any westward advance by Russia.

The city has been a frequent target of Russian attacks. A missile strike killed 63 people at a railway station there in April 2022, one of the worst single air strikes of the war.

(Reporting by Max Hunder in Kramatorsk, and Anna Pruchnicka and Pavel PolityukEditing by Timothy Heritage and Peter Graff)

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