Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian shopping center in the middle of the country with over 1,000 people inside, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday.
“The occupiers fired rockets at the mall, where there were more than a thousand civilians… The number of victims is impossible to imagine,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram along with a video of the mall on fire and first responders on the scene.
The shopping center was located in Kremenchuk, a city in the Poltava region. Two people have been confirmed dead and 20 are injured, according to Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Gerashchenko also posted a video of people allegedly fleeing the wreckage, crying out and fighting through fire and smoke.
Zelensky said the shopping center had no “strategic value” to the war.
“Russia continues to place its powerlessness on ordinary citizens. It is useless to hope for adequacy and humanity on [Russia’s] part,” Zelensky added.
“The missile strike on Kremenchuk hit a very crowded place, which is 100% irrelevant to the war,” Vitalii Maletskyi, the mayor of Kremenchuk, said in a Facebook post, adding that there are people who are “dead and injured.”
The strike took place as G7 leaders met in Germany to discuss further actions against Russia for its military actions against Ukraine. Zelensky told the world leaders in a virtual meeting he wanted the war to be over by the end of 2022, according to CNN.
“Zelensky was very much focused on trying to ensure that Ukraine is in as advantageous a position on the battlefield as possible in the next months as opposed to the next years, because he believes that a grinding conflict is not in the interest of the Ukrainian people,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said following the meeting, according to the outlet.