KREMENCHUK, Ukraine (AP) – The French president on Tuesday denounced Russia’s airstrike on a mall full of Ukrainian people as a “new war crime” and promised Western support to Kyiv he would not give up, saying Moscow “cannot and should not win” the war. .
The strike, which killed at least 18 people in the central city of Kremenchuk, occurred when leaders of the Group of Seven nations were meeting in Europe. It was part of an unusually intense Russian fire bombardment across Ukraine, including in the capital, Kyiv, which renewed international attention as the war dragged on.
Speaking at the end of the G-7 summit in Germany, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to address this concern, promising that the seven major industrialized democracies would support Ukraine and maintain sanctions against Russia “whenever necessary and with the necessary intensity “. ”
“Russia cannot and must not win,” he said. He described Monday’s attack on the mall as a “new war crime.”
As they have done in other attacks, Russian officials claimed the mall was not the target.
In a virtual address to the UN Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had become a terrorist state and called for it to be expelled from the United Nations. He also urged the UN to establish an international tribunal to investigate Russia’s action in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy ended his speech by asking everyone present in the chamber to silently hide from the “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian children and adults killed in the war. All members of the council stood up, including Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky.
How to counter Russia and support Ukraine will also be the focus of a summit this week of the NATO alliance, whose support has been instrumental to Kyiv’s ability to defend larger and better-equipped forces of Moscow. Ukrainian leaders, however, say they need more and better weapons if they want to hold on and even push back Russia, which is pushing for a total assault on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
As Macron spoke, lifeguards combed the charred rubble of the mall, which officials said was hit when there were more than 1,000 afternoon shoppers and workers inside.
Kateryna Romashyna, a local resident, told The Associated Press that she had just arrived at the mall when an explosion hit her. When another explosion arrived about 10 minutes later, he realized he had to flee.
“I fled the epicenter with all my might,” he said. Fighting tears, he added, “You have to be a real monster” to hit a mall.
Many inside were quickly fleeing the building when an air raid siren sounded and took refuge across the street, Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky said. Several of the bodies of those who did not leave in time are burned without being recognized, he said.
In addition to the 18 dead, authorities said 59 were injured, while 21 people were still missing.
The attack was reminiscent of pre-war strikes that hit a theater, a train station and a hospital. Zelenskyy described it as “one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.”
Rocket attacks continued in other parts of Ukraine, and Dnipro city authorities reported that workers at a diesel car repair shop were trapped in rubble after a missile attack. cruise fired from the Black Sea, Ukrainian news agencies reported. The Ukrainian army managed to intercept and destroy other missiles fired at the city, agencies said.
As the condemnation came from many quarters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made a defiant note, saying Russia would press its offensive until it meets its targets. He said hostilities could stop “before the end of the day” if Ukraine surrendered and met Russia’s demands, including acknowledging its control over the territory it has taken by force.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov claimed that the warplanes fired precision-guided missiles at a depot containing Western weapons and ammunition, which detonated and set fire to the mall. Ukrainian authorities said that in addition to the direct impact on the mall, a factory was attacked, but denied that it housed weapons.
Konashenkov also falsely alleged that the mall was not in use.
One survivor, Oleksandr, a mall employee, told the AP from a hospital bed that the mall was full of customers. He remembered going out with a partner for a cigarette when the siren of the air attack sounded.
“There was a black tunnel, smoke, fire,” he said. “I started crawling. I saw the sun up there and my brain was telling me I had to save myself.”
Ukraine’s Attorney General Iryna Venediktova said the missile attack was one of Russia’s “crimes against humanity.” He stressed the need for all Ukrainians to stay alert and expect a similar strike “every minute.”
On Tuesday, Russian forces struck the city of Otxakiv in the Black Sea, damaging apartment buildings and killing two, including a 6-year-old boy. Six more people, four of them children, were injured. One of them, a 3-month-old baby, is in a coma, according to authorities.
The unusually intense blast came as G-7 leaders pledged to continue supporting Ukraine and prepared new sanctions against Russia, such as a cap on oil prices and higher tariffs on goods.
Zelenskyy has called for more air defense systems from his Western allies to help his forces fight. NATO support for Ukraine will be the main focus of a summit to begin this week in Madrid, and a first sign of unity came on Tuesday when Turkey agreed to lift its opposition to Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the two Nordic countries to abandon their long-standing non-aligned status and apply to join NATO. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had blocked the measure, insisting that they change their position on Kurdish rebel groups that Turkey considers terrorists.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned the West that “the more weapons are injected into Ukraine, the longer the conflict will last and the longer the agony of the Nazi regime backed by Western capitals will last.”
Russia has falsely called the war a campaign to “de-Nazize” Ukraine, a country with a democratically elected Jewish president that wants closer ties with the West.
In a sinister message to NATO leaders, the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos released satellite images and accurate coordinates of the conference room where its summit will be held.
He also published images and coordinates of the White House, the Pentagon and government headquarters in London, Paris and Berlin, referring to them as “decision-making centers that support Ukrainian nationalists” in a message to the Telegram app. This wording echoes warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin that he could target these centers in response to what he has called Western aggression.
In other developments:
– One of the two Britons sentenced to death by separatist forces in eastern Ukraine has filed a formal appeal, Russia’s Tass news agency reported early Wednesday. The report said the appeal filed on behalf of Shaun Pinner will be considered within two months.
Pinner, Aiden Aslin and Moroccan Brahim Saadoun were sentenced to death on June 9 and given a month to appeal. The court held that they were fighting for Ukraine as mercenaries, so they were not entitled to the protections provided to prisoners of war. There was no mention of appeals for the other two men.
– The two struggling countries continued a sporadic series of prisoner exchanges. Ukraine traded 15 Russian prisoners of war for 16 Ukrainian soldiers and a civilian, Ukrainian press Pravda reported on Tuesday.
– The Ukrainian Pravda also reported that in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, the mayor was arrested on Tuesday and the occupying authorities confiscated the hard drive and documents from his computer after he had refused to cooperate with officials premises designated by Russia. Russian news agency Tass confirmed the arrest.
– Bulgaria said on Tuesday it was expelling 70 Russian diplomats considered a “threat to national security,” and ordered them to leave within five days. A statement from Bulgaria’s foreign ministry said this would reduce the staff of the Russian embassy in Sofia “to 23 diplomats and 25 administrators and technicians”.
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Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists Oleksandr Stashevskyi in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Edith M. Lederer of the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Follow the AP war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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This version corrects by saying that Zelenskyy called Russia a terrorist state and did not call Putin a terrorist.