A Russian missile hit a crowded restaurant at dinner time in eastern Ukraine, killing at least eight people, including three children, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday. More than 50 were wounded.
The pizza restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk took a direct hit on Tuesday night and the blast blew out the windows and the walls and brought down the roof. Rescue crews searched through the night and feared more people could be buried in the debris.
“Two rockets were fired at the city of Kramatorsk … at a food establishment in the centre of the city where there were a great number of civilians,” said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the eastern Donetsk region.
Asked about the attack, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said: “We condemn Russia’s brutal strikes against the people of Ukraine, which have caused widespread death and destruction and taken the lives of so many Ukrainian civilians.”
Kramatorsk, once a city of 150,000 inhabitants, is the last major urban centre under Ukrainian control in the east of the country. It lies about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from Bakhmut, the town the Russians captured last month in the heaviest fighting of the war.
