Russian aerial strikes across Ukraine killed at least seven people on Saturday, a day after drone attacks on a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih left 16 people dead and more than 130 injured. Rescue workers continued searching through the wreckage of the mall as the death toll from Friday's attack held at 16, with nine people still reported missing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said one person was killed and another wounded when Russian ballistic missiles struck railway infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv, overnight. Russia's Defense Ministry said its forces had hit a locomotive depot. A separate Russian ballistic missile strike on the broader Kyiv region on Saturday afternoon killed two more people, local authorities said.
Russian drone strikes also killed one person overnight in the Zaporizhzhia region, with a daytime attack there killing three others and wounding 15. Zelenskyy said three more people were wounded in an attack on a minibus in the regional capital. In the Kherson region, Russian strikes damaged homes and apartment buildings, killing three people and wounding 13. In the Donetsk region, attacks left one person dead and seven wounded, including five in the front-line city of Kramatorsk, according to regional governor Vadym Filashkin.
On the other side of the border, Russian authorities in the Krasnodar region said two children were killed and two adults were wounded in a Ukrainian drone strike.
Friday's mall attack in Kryvyi Rih drew sharp condemnation from Ukrainian officials. Zelenskyy called the strike "absolutely cynical and despicable" and an "act of barbarism." "Attacks like these are nothing less than terrorist acts," he posted on Telegram.
According to Al Jazeera, the attack began at 4:30 in the afternoon when the mall was typically crowded. Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the Kryvyi Rih Defense Council, said Russian forces targeted the city's largest shopping center with jet-powered Shahed drones. A second wave struck roughly 30 minutes after the first, with reports indicating it targeted emergency crews responding to the scene.
Zelenskyy described the attack as a so-called double-tap strike, in which a second drone targeted the building after rescuers had already begun responding. "People came to the shopping center for their ordinary business: to shop, to work, or to spend time with loved ones. For Russia, this makes no difference," Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner Dymtro Lubinets wrote on social media, according to ABC News.
Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha confirmed Saturday morning that the death toll from Friday's mall attack had risen to 16, with more than 130 wounded, including 22 children. Moscow's forces have recently intensified their ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, exploiting Ukraine's shortage of US-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the only weapon in Ukraine's arsenal capable of shooting down such missiles. Large-scale Russian strikes have become a regular occurrence this summer.
