A Russian missile hits a busy restaurant in Kramatorsk, killing at least four.
A Russian missile strike slammed into a popular pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk during dinner on Tuesday night, killing at least four people and injuring more than 40 others, according to Ukrainian officials.
There was a large crowd of people in the restaurant, in Kramatorsk city center, when the missile hit Tuesday, the head of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on national television.
Among the dead is a 17-year-old girl and at least 42 people were injured, the prosecutor’s office of Ukraine said. said in a statement. Three hours after the attack, the attorney general warned that more people could be trapped under the rubble.
Videos taken at the scene show a fire raging in a badly damaged building as black smoke rises above. Rescuers cared for the wounded on rubble-strewn streets as sirens blared. It took firefighters nearly three hours to extinguish the blaze, Ukraine’s emergency services said said.
Journalists on the scene identified the restaurant hit as Ria Lounge, a long-running popular haunt in Kramatorsk known to many as Ria Pizza. The restaurant, located on the ground floor, closed after the invasion began in February last year, but reopened a few months later.
Ria Lounge is especially popular in summer with its covered seating area. Ukrainian soldiers stationed nearby, some of them just returning from the front, are frequent visitors, along with locals, foreign journalists and aid workers.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a British freelance photographer who dined inside, said the restaurant was “pretty busy” around 7:30pm on Tuesday night. The kitchen would close about half an hour later.
A young woman with a baby in a pushchair was sitting just next to Ms Taylor-Lind eating pizza with a colleague when she said she heard a “roaring” sound and knew “immediately” it was an incoming missile. Then there was an explosion.
“I felt hot air and the sound of breaking glass and debris flying, clattering and rumbling,” she said. “It just went on and on.”
Ms Taylor-Lind said she and her colleague slid off their chairs and went to the basement, fearful of another strike. Both were bleeding. A member of the waiting staff washed the blood off her face, Ms Taylor-Lind said, and also helped her colleague.
When they emerged from the basement, the restaurant was a sea of broken glass and tangled metal, she said. The ambulances had not yet arrived.
“Everyone who had been in the restaurant and wasn’t hurt was helping the people who were,” she said.
Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, is far enough from the frontline for life to seem relatively normal on most days. But air raid sirens are common and sometimes the sounds of distant artillery are heard.
The city had a pre-war population of about 150,000 people and was once one of the industrial centers of the Donbas region. Many people fled in the first months of the large-scale invasion. Since last year, some locals have started to return.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine noted that the missile strike occurred on the anniversary of an attack on a shopping mall in the city Kremenchuk, when 22 people died. He said the Russians had used S-300 missiles in Kramatorsk, a long-range surface-to-air missile that Moscow has fired at targets on the ground.