KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (Reuters) – The body of a boy was pulled out of the rubble of a building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Wednesday, taking the death toll from a Russian missile strike to nine, the city mayor said.
The prosecutor general said 60 people were also wounded in the attack on Tuesday evening, when a missile slammed into a busy restaurant, and officials said two girls aged 14 and a girl aged 17 were among the dead.
“Rescuers pulled a boy’s body from the rubble,” mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday morning as search and rescue operations continued. He did not give the boy’s age.
Emergency services said seven people had been rescued and put the number of wounded at 56, slightly lower than the figure provided by the prosecutor general.
The restaurant building was reduced to a twisted web of metal beams.
“I ran here after the explosion because I rented a cafe here…. Everything has been blown out there,” said Valentyna, a 64-year-old woman who declined to give her surname.
“None of the glass, windows or doors are left. All I see is destruction, fear and horror. This is the 21st century,” she told a Reuters correspondent in Kramatorsk.
A second missile hit a village on the fringes of Kramatorsk, wounding five.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video message on Tuesday that the attacks showed Russia “deserved only one thing as a consequence of what it has done — defeat and a tribunal”.
Russia has frequently hit Ukrainian cities since its full-scale invasion in February 2022 but denies targeting civilians.
Kramatorsk lies west of front lines in Donetsk province and is a likely objective in any westward advance by Russia.
The city has been a frequent target of Russian attacks, and a missile strike killed 63 people at a railway station in April 2022.
(Reporting by Max Hunder in Kramatorsk, Anna Pruchnicka and Kyiv newsroom, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
