A night out for dinner ends in destruction and death
Mykyta Karagodin and friends had just gotten their mango passion fruit drinks and placed their dinner order on the terrace of the Ria Lounge on Tuesday evening – a lazy summer evening at a popular restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. Then they heard a whistle.
“At first we thought it was a plane, nothing serious. But then someone yelled ‘Down on the floor!’” said Mr Karagodin, 23. “Then there was an explosion.”
A Russian missile landed at the restaurant around 7:30 p.m., the bustle at dinner time, when it was busy: a young mother with a baby in a stroller, a woman making kissing noises to a husky dog, filming a video of themselves on the terrace. The blast wave threw diners and workers against walls, furniture and each other, hitting and slashing them with shards of glass and other debris.
By Wednesday night, the death toll from the attack had risen to 11 people, including 14-year-old twin sisters and another teenager. Ukrainian authorities said 56 other people were injured. At least one person is still under the rubble.
In the confused moments after the blast, Mr. Karagodin recalled, a voice yelled for people to go to the basement. He and his friends dragged injured and disoriented people down with them.
“The first floor was completely gone,” he said Wednesday afternoon, waiting to be released from a hospital after being treated for shrapnel and a concussion. “We’ve all been very lucky.”
Rescuers worked all day excavating the remains of the restaurant in search of victims or possible survivors. The terrace where Mr. Karagodin and his friends sat waiting for salads was a mess of overturned black-and-white sofas, next to a jumble of jagged concrete blocks. The owner of the restaurant paced while she was on the phone.
As a crane lifted the rubble from a large pile of twisted rubble, distraught friends and relatives of those still missing waited anxiously behind police tape across the street. When a body was pulled from the rubble, people strained to see if it was their loved one. But each time, the body bag was zipped up tight and a rescue truck rushed him to the morgue.
A woman was waiting for news about her niece. A man was looking for information about his brother-in-law. When aid workers came out to take breaks and pour water on their heads to wash off the dust, people rushed to ask for updates — with one man showing a photo of his missing relative on his phone.
Kramatorsk is just 20 miles from the front lines and the ruined city of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region – close enough to be a frequent target of Russian missiles and a way station for troops. But it’s also just far enough away from the fighting to entice people to go about their normal day-to-day lives, especially in recent weeks when the weather turned warm and strikes were relatively rare.
Known to many as Ria Pizza, Ria Lounge was a long-running haunt, especially popular in the summer for its covered outdoor seating. It is close to Hotel Kramatorsk, which was badly damaged in a Russian attack last summer. The restaurant was closed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year, but reopened a few months later.
The restaurant is often packed with local residents, foreign journalists, aid workers and Ukrainian soldiers.
“Me and my friends used to go there all the time,” said Mr. Karagodin, who described the staff as young and friendly. “Every night we rested there, every night there were people, everyone with children.”
“It was such a fun evening,” said 40-year-old Oleksandra, a local journalist who was not at the restaurant but lives nearby. “A typical summer evening: warm and quiet.”
Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement it had attacked a Ukrainian army command post, without mentioning a restaurant or civilians, and a Kremlin spokesman repeated Russia’s frequent, false claim that it did not hit civilian targets. It was not clear whether a military command post existed nearby, although soldiers are often housed nearby when turned away from the front.
The medical director of the local hospital in Kramatorsk, Hanna Scherbak, said 49 injured people were admitted there after the attack, suffering from head injuries, shrapnel and broken limbs, including one who later died.
“We had no soldiers. These are all civilians,” she said.
Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, said it had apprehended a man who was accused of helping lead the missile strike. It said the man — described as a resident of Kramatorsk who worked for a local gas transportation company — had sent video footage of the restaurant to Russian military intelligence.
The explosion caused a fire at the restaurant. Diners and spectators rushed to reach the wounded through piles of tangled and charred metal, concrete and broken glass. Some men took off their shirts to use as bandages, while others wrapped bloodied heads and checked the pulse of a woman sitting motionless on a couch.
By late Wednesday, the rain had driven most of the bystanders to the scene, but about 20 people still stood across the road behind police tape, seemingly hushed by fatigue and fear. They had been there all day, used paper cups, empty water bottles and energy drinks piled around their makeshift holding area.
Friends and relatives of one still trapped under the rubble stared at the backs of rescuers clearing debris from the restaurant. A young man, wearing a blue rubber glove on his hand and a fresh white bandage on his leg, crossed the police tape and approached the wreckage. A police officer gently escorted him back to the waiting group, where the young man hugged a young woman as she quietly cried on his shoulder.
A middle-aged man was pacing back and forth a few feet away.
“Let them all live there,” a red-faced woman in the group told him.
“Let them all live,” he repeated.