Ukraine mall victims ‘burnt beyond recognition’
City’s residents count the brutal cost of Russia’s ‘defiant’ missile attack on packed shopping centre
When Nigel Freedman moved to Kremenchuk in Ukraine seven years ago, the staff at the electronics shop at his nearby shopping mall helped him feel at home. Young, friendly and fluent in English, they advised the techchallenged pensioner from Margate in Kent on buying his new mobile phone and TV, saving him having to grapple with instruction booklets in Cyrillic.
Yesterday, as he stood near his apartment block overlooking the mall, he wondered which of them – if any – had survived the Russian missile attack that turned it into 12,000 square yards of charred debris.
“I go to that mall every day, and I know the electric shop staff very well – they help an old guy like me with the techy stuff,” said Mr Freedman, 74, who moved to Kremenchuk to be with his Ukrainian wife. “But I know that at least two of them are missing. It’s terrible – most of the people who worked in that place were young folk in their 20s or 30s.”
At least 18 people died and 50 more were injured in Monday’s missile attack on the Amstor mall, which was packed with shoppers.
Ukrainian officials said yesterday that up to 36 more missing people were feared dead, their bodies incinerated beyond recognition.
Whatever the final death toll, it is already one of the deadliest Russian missile attacks on civilian buildings since the war began four months ago.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has branded it “one of the most defiant terrorist attacks in European history”.
At the scene yesterday, teams of firefighters sat exhausted after working all night to pull bodies from the rubble. Meanwhile, from his bed in a nearby hospital, one shrapnelpeppered survivor told how two massive explosions had engulfed the building, creating a smoking inferno.
“There was an air raid warning a few minutes beforehand, and I stepped outside the building to have a smoke,” said Alexander, 33, who declined to give his surname. “The blast threw me under a truck, and there was a huge amount of dust and smoke. It was only after a while that I could see light. I am very lucky to be alive.”
It was not the first time that Russia has bombed Ukrainian shopping malls, which it claims are used as storage depots for weapons. One mall was completely destroyed in Odesa in early May, killing one person and injuring six, while another was hit in Kyiv in mid-march, killing eight.
However, in both previous shopping mall strikes, the missiles hit late in the evening, when the premises were
‘Firefighters are shocked – they hoped to rescue some people but the fire engulfed the building in minutes and they found hardly anyone alive’
occupied only by night staff, keeping casualties to a relative minimum. There was no such caution with Monday’s strike in Kremenchuk, a gritty industrial city where the mall is one of the few attractions. Among locals it is popular for its coffee shops, well-stocked deli, and having the best toy shop in town.
CCTV footage from a nearby water park captured how the missile shook the neighbourhood, with chunks of shrapnel and debris falling into the park’s artificial lake. Passers-by could be seen running for cover.
Mr Freedman said that after the explosions, the heat and smoke from the blaze made it perilous for rescue workers to get close.
“A lot of cars in the car park started to explode, which made it even more difficult for the emergency services to do anything,” he added.
Located on the River Dnipro in central Ukraine, Kremenchuk has until now been largely unscathed by the war – hence Mr Freedman’s decision to stay put when the Foreign Office advised all Britons to leave. Yet like many Ukrainian cities, air raid sirens still ring out several times every day – so much so that they are often simply ignored.
That, though, may have made the difference between life and death for those in the Amstor mall on Monday.
“I left the mall after I heard the air raid alarm, and a few minutes later the explosions happened – if I hadn’t left, I would have died,” said mall worker Daria Yukhno, 25, whose jewellery store stock had been melted by the heat of the blaze. “I think some people just figured it was a false alarm as usual and stayed where they were. A friend of mine who worked in a coffee shop has died, and lots of other people I know have just disappeared.”
Svetlana Rybalko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Fire and Rescue Service, said the missile strike was the worst carnage she had encountered in 21 years in the emergency services.
“I have seen a lot of bad stuff, but this was something unreal – and this was done deliberately. The firefighters themselves are shocked – they hoped to rescue some people but the fire engulfed the building in just a few minutes and they found hardly anybody left alive,” she said.
They are finding body parts that are unrecognisable – we are hoping that it’s not children.” Ukrainian prosecutors have described the attack as a “crime against humanity”, and international war crimes investigators have already visited the scene.
Within hours of its previous missile attack on a shopping mall in Kyiv in March, the Kremlin promptly produced detailed video footage that appeared to support its claim that the premises had been used to hide mobile weapons systems.
As of last night, there had been no such footage produced for the Kremenchuk attack.
Moscow claimed the blaze at the shopping mall was caused by fire spreading from its strike on a nearby Western arms depot. It also falsely said the mall was empty.
Meanwhile, Mr Freedman was still waiting anxiously to hear of news of his friends from the electronics shop.
When it finally come through, it was even worse than he had feared: “One is dead, five are in hospital and nine are missing,” he said.