[PHOTOS] At least 10 dead and 40 injured in shopping mall strike in Ukraine

KYIV | A Russian missile hit a “busy” shopping center in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, on Monday, killing and injuring people, local authorities said, adding that the toll could be very heavy.

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According to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, at least two people were killed and 20 others injured, nine of them in serious condition. “Rescue operations continue,” he wrote on Telegram.

“The occupiers fired a missile at a shopping center where there were more than a thousand civilians. The mall is on fire and rescuers are battling the blaze. The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Facebook.

He accompanied his message with a video showing the shopping center on fire, emitting large clouds of smoke, with fire engines and a dozen people on site.

“The missile fire on Kremenchuk hit a very crowded place that has no connection with the hostilities”, for his part indicated on Facebook Vitali Maletsky, the mayor of this city which had 220,000 inhabitants before the war.

“There are dead and injured. More details will come,” he added.

Regional Governor Dmytro Lounin denounced a “war crime” and a “crime against humanity”, as well as an “undisguised and cynical act of terror against the civilian population”.

“The world is horrified,” says Blinken

US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said the world was “horrified” by Monday’s Russian missile strike on a shopping mall in central Ukraine that left at least 10 people dead and 40 injured.

Describing the missile strike as “the latest in a series of atrocities,” the secretary of state tweeted that the United States would continue to support its Ukrainian partners and hold “Russia to account, including those responsible for atrocities”.