Sunday, May 26, 2024, 2:56 p.m.
The Police have already discovered the bodies of fourteen people after the Russian attack on a hypermarket in Kharkiv. A day after two missiles fell on the establishment, which has been reduced to ruins, rescue teams are trying to locate sixteen missing people. A total of 43 injured people remain admitted to hospitals.
“The search is being sad and painful,” explained this Sunday one of the 200 rescuers working on the operation. After the successive impact of the two projectiles, the establishment burned quickly. This is a large DIY and construction area. All the flammable materials ignited and spread the fire to approximately 13,000 square meters of facilities. It took firefighters sixteen hours to extinguish the fire. «The interior is unrecognizable; “a mass of rubble and molten materials,” said one of them.
A video released by the security forces captures the moment of impact of the first missile. Everything happens normally inside the establishment, a large area dedicated to construction and DIY, when a flash occurs, everything fills with smoke and the camera stops working. «It happened suddenly. At first, we didn’t understand, everything went black and things started falling on our heads,” a cleaning employee told AFP. «Thank goodness my phone turned on. Thanks to the flashlight I found where to go, but in front of us everything was already burning,” she added.
A firefighter fights a fire inside a premises
EFE
Two of the deceased were employees of the store, belonging to the Epicenter K chain. The company has lost five other centers in different Ukrainian cities under Russian bombing and has closed several more due to the precarious working conditions, without electricity or water. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has traveled to the scene to condemn an attack carried out against an “obviously civilian target.”
The Police have already collected the DNA of a dozen people who have reported the disappearance of a loved one after the attack in the shopping center. Efforts to identify the recovered bodies are progressing slowly while the search for the missing bodies continues. «It is clear that people were not at all prepared for such an attack. “People were at their workplaces and doing their own business,” said members of the Police after beginning to review the store’s recordings. However, some versions maintain that some of the employees had already started to evacuate the clients moments before the impacts when they heard the sound of the anti-aircraft alarms.
A desperate woman tries to find a family member.
Ukrainian Rescue Service
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Russia launched a total of sixteen missiles and thirty attack drones on Kharkov between Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning. It has been a day of fire in Kharkiv, where bombings are becoming more frequent. One of the projectiles hit the city center and left 25 people injured.
The Kremlin has not officially commented on the attack on the hypermarket, but military sources have leaked to the media the version that there was “a military warehouse and a command post” of the Ukrainian army inside the establishment. In the video images recovered so far, only employees and civilians are seen doing their shopping.
With the rubble of the establishment in the background, Zelensky has directed harsh reproaches to the Russian president, who only twenty-four hours earlier had proposed an offer to decree a ceasefire if kyiv handed over the four territories conquered in the Donbas. “Only insane people like Putin are capable of terrorizing people in such a nefarious manner,” said Zelensky, who has made an offer to his American and Chinese counterparts to participate in the Swiss peace summit in mid-June.
Neither Joe Biden nor Xi Jinping have confirmed their attendance, while the Ukrainian leader has urged that it be as massive a summit as possible, since “the efforts of the global majority are the best guarantee that all commitments are met.” . Zelensky is scheduled to arrive in Spain today to meet with King Felipe VI and sign a security agreement with the Government. The visit agenda is hermetic. Two weeks ago the Ukrainian president suspended the trip due to the worsening of the fighting against the Russians on the front.
A missile destroyed a residential building in Kharkiv on Saturday night.
EFE
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The head of diplomacy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, has condemned the attack on the Kharkiv hypermarket as a new “war crime” by Russia. “These systematic Russian crimes against civilians and civilian infrastructure once again underline the need for Europe to urgently increase support for air defense: it saves lives and protects Ukrainian cities,” added Borrell, who trusts that “all perpetrators of “This and other Russian war crimes are held accountable,”
The UN has also been “dismayed and shocked by the terrifying news coming from Kharkiv.” The humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, Denise Brown, recalled that “intentionally directing an attack against civilian infrastructure is strictly prohibited by International Law” and has demanded the “cessation” of all attacks on the population and civilian infrastructure.
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