(Kramatorsk) At least ten people died and 61 were injured in a Russian strike on Tuesday against a popular restaurant in Kramatorsk, a large city in eastern Ukraine still controlled by Kyiv, authorities announced on Wednesday.
“Ten people were killed and 61 injured by the Russian attack on Kramatorsk,” Ukrainian police said on Facebook.
Three minors are among the dead and a child born in 2022 among the injured, according to the Emergency Situations Service, which said rescue operations are continuing and seven people have been rescued from the rubble alive.
Police say Russia fired two S-300 surface-to-air missiles at Kramatorsk, which had a population of 150,000 before the war entered its sixteenth month.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured that Russia only strikes in Ukraine “facilities that are somehow linked to military infrastructure”.
The strike destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant, a downtown establishment popular with journalists, aid workers and soldiers. Ukrainian media have mentioned the presence of foreign military instructors in town.
PHOTO GENYA SAVILOV, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Three Colombian personalities, the famous writer Hector Abad, the politician Sergio Jaramillo and the journalist Catalina Gomez, correspondent in Ukraine for the daily El Tiempo, were slightly injured while having dinner in the restaurant with the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, According to a press release signed by MM. Abad and Jaramillo.
Wounded novelist
The latter, a 37-year-old novelist, “is in critical condition, injured in the skull”, adds the text.
In addition to the restaurant, apartments, shops, cars, a post office and several other buildings suffered damage, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office.
An AFP reporter at the scene of the strike saw ambulances, police, soldiers and the mayor of the city near this restaurant, in front of which a crowd of residents gathered.
A chef in a dust-covered uniform, Rouslan, 32, said there were “a lot of people” in the restaurant at the time of the strike, pointing to the sky: “I had luck “.
An important railway hub and home to military sites, Kramatorsk is very regularly targeted by Russian bombardments.
PHOTO GENYA SAVILOV, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The deadliest was that of the train station, struck in April 2022, which left 61 dead and more than 160 injured a few weeks after the start of the Russian invasion and when a crowd of civilians tried to leave the city.
Prigozhin in Belarus
On the other side of the front, the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner Yevgeny Prigojine was welcomed to Belarus on Tuesday as part of an agreement that ended his spectacular rebellion in Russia, announced Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Mr. Lukashenko assured that he had advised Russian President Vladimir Putin not to “butt” Mr. Prigojine and considered that Belarus could benefit from the “experience” of the Wagner fighters who will come to take refuge there.
The tempestuous boss of Wagner had evaporated since announcing the end of his rebellion on Saturday evening, after 24 hours of chaos which saw his men seize military bases and march on Moscow, before suddenly turning around. .
PHOTO YULIA MOROZOVA, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Yevgeny Prigozhin
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned Moscow and Minsk against any “threat” that the presence of Wagner’s boss in Belarus, bordering Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, three member countries of the Covenant.
If the shock wave of the revolt led by the men of Yevgeny Prigojine remains to be measured, the Kremlin has already denied that Russian President Vladimir Putin has emerged weakened from this crisis, yet the worst in more than two decades of reign.
Imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny on the contrary estimated on Tuesday that the population had not supported Mr. Putin and that the master of the Kremlin represented a “threat to Russia”.
For his part, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kouleba, minimized the impact on the conflict of the internal divisions exposed in Russia by the mutiny.
“Unfortunately, Prigozhin gave up too quickly. So there was not enough time for this demoralizing effect to penetrate the trenches,” Kouleba said on CNN.