KYIV — Five people were killed and at least 67 others wounded after a Russian strike on a shopping center in Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, authorities said.
Among those injured are three teenage boys.
Shops and vehicles were hit in the daylight attack, which took place “when the streets were full of people”, Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said in a social media post.
Two other shopping malls in the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Sumy were targeted by Russian air strikes earlier this week, according to Ukrainian media.
“The world sees what Russia is doing. There will be support for Ukraine. One hundred percent of our attention is focused on this,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram, stressing that decisions with partners on additional support, including strengthening Ukraine’s air defenses, were expected later in the day “to protect Ukrainians from such Russian terror.”
Russia reported a Ukrainian seaborne drone attack on the resort city of Sochi overnight on Wednesday, in which 28 people were wounded, as well as three more deaths blamed on Ukrainian attacks.
A full-scale war has been raging between Russia and Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion more than four and a half years ago.
A new peacemaking effort by envoys sent by US President Donald Trump at the weekend appears to have yielded few concrete results, after talks in Moscow with Putin and in Kyiv with Zelensky.
Images released by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine show firefighters directing water hoses at burning vehicles amid clouds of smoke on a street in Pavlohrad.
In a Telegram post, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said of the 67 people injured, eight are children.
Zelensky offered his condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed in Thursday’s attack.
“The Russians used drones to kill people who were simply standing near shopping centres,” Ukraine’s president said in his statement.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the drone attack a “tactic of coercion”. “Russia believes that relentless attacks on civilians can exhaust Ukrainians and force Ukraine into concession,” he said.
Pavlohrad, a logistics hub near the central city of Dnipro, has come under heavy attack previously, with two people killed in an attack on warehouses there last month.
Ukrainian officials say a Russian drone attack on a mall in Sumy on Wednesday killed two people and wounded 20. On Thursday, Russian aerial bombing reportedly injured eight people in Sumy, including three children.
In Zaporizhzhia, capital of the region of the same name which was partially annexed by Russia soon after the invasion, a shopping mall was almost completely destroyed on Monday, its owners reported.
However, it was closed at the time and there were no immediate reports of casualties.
One of the bloodiest attacks on a shopping centre came last month, when Ukrainian officials say Russian drones killed at least 16 people and injured 130 in the city of Kryvyi Rih.
Shopping malls in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine have also come under attack, with a Ukrainian drone attack reported on Monday on a mall in the port city of Mariupol, Donetsk region, and another attack on the city of Donetsk last month.
On Wednesday night, a number of Ukrainian seaborne drones attacked the shoreline at Sochi, Russian officials say. Two of the 28 people reported injured are children.
On Thursday, Russian officials reported that a Ukrainian drone strike on the town of Novy Oskol in Belgord Region had killed one person and wounded six others.
It was further announced that a Ukrainian attack on a car in Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday had killed a girl of 15, also injuring a child of six and two women; and a separate attack on a civilian lorry in the same region had killed a man.
Source: Saudi Gazette