Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to respond to a brutal Russian “double-tap” strike on a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, central Ukraine, that killed at least 16 people.
Rescuers have been combing through rubble from Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s hometown, which has been targeted multiple times during the four-year war.
The drone attack, which Zelensky condemned as “cowardly,” came as Ukraine sustains rising civilian casualties due to a critical shortage of US-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the only system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.
“The attack drones struck in two waves: half an hour after the first strike and the resulting fire, there was a second strike targeting emergency responders,” Zelensky posted on Telegram.
He warned that Ukraine “will definitely respond” to the attack.
Footage geolocated by CNN shows a drone hitting a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, causing a fireball to erupt into the sky as it explodes, all while smoke from an apparent earlier strike is still visible.
Smoke filled the inside of the shopping center as people hurriedly tried to leave, videos filmed at the scene show. Stores inside the shopping center caught fire, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s defense council.
Among the 130 wounded, at least 29 are in serious condition, Vilkul said, including a 14-year-old girl with a traumatic brain injury and four other children.
On Saturday he warned citizens against visiting shopping centers that are not equipped with shelters, citing intelligence reports that further strikes on such locations are possible.
He urged the public to seek shelter promptly when air-raid alarms are heard, adding that Friday’s siren sounded for 20 minutes before the explosion occurred: “But the shops were open, people were inside them, and very few went to take shelter,” Vilkul said.
The strike on the mall happened a day after Russia carried out a large attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, killing at least 17 people, according to Ukraine.
Russia has continued its attacks across Ukraine over the past 24 hours, with strikes reported in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Sumy, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Odesa. At least nine more people have been killed.
Ukrainian forces struck two targets in Russia’s Samara Oblast region overnight – the Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery and an Ozon logistics hub, which is a competitor to Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, a frequent target in recent weeks as Kyiv brings the war to Russian soil.
Russia’s defense ministry said it intercepted more than 450 Ukrainian drones, while Veniamin Kondratyev, governor of the Krasnodar Krai region, said two children were killed.
Both sides have stepped up their air campaigns as the front lines remain largely static, locked in a slow-moving, deadly stalemate.
Moscow is yet to comment on the attack on the shopping mall directly, but in an interview published on Saturday, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine’s leaders had “themselves let the genie out of the bottle when they started targeting our civilian enterprises.”
“They publicly declared their aim: to destroy the Russian economy. Well then – now you’ll get a response,” he said in an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin.
Ukraine sees strikes on facilities like Ozon as a legitimate war of undermining Moscow’s war driven economy.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha again urged allies to provide more missile interceptors and impose additional sanctions on Russia’s military-industrial complex.
“Russia must be denied both the ability to produce these means of terror and the ability to use them,” he said.
CNN’s Michael Rios, Victoria Butenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina contributed to this report.
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