A Russian strike against a restaurant in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, killed at least 8 people and injured 56 on Tuesday, June 27, according to a new report released on Wednesday by the emergency services. Among the dead are three children, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said on Telegram. “Rescuers are digging through the rubble of the destroyed building and looking for people who are likely under the rubble,” he added.
“Two rockets were fired at the city of Kramatorsk,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the eastern Donetsk region, previously told television. The rockets fell on the Ria Pizza restaurant, an establishment popular with journalists and the military, “where there was a large concentration of civilians”, the governor said. According to Ukrainian police, Russia fired two S-300 surface-to-air rockets.
Three Colombian personalities, including the famous writer Hector Abad, were slightly injured in the bombardment. “While we were having dinner at the Rai Pizzeria restaurant with Victoria Amelima, an extraordinary Ukrainian writer, and the great (Colombian) journalist Catalina Gomez, the restaurant was the target of a Russian missile strike,” reads a statement signed by Hector Abad and Sergio Jaramillo.
An internationally renowned writer, Hector Abad is notably the author of The Oblivion that We Will Be, a literary success from which a film was made in 2020. Mr. Jaramillo, a Colombian politician, was one of the main negotiators of the peace agreement signed in 2016 with the Marxist Farc guerrillas. Both, along with journalist Catalina Gomez, were “slightly injured” in the attack and hospitalized, according to their statement posted on Twitter.
Ms. Gomez is the correspondent in Ukraine for the leading daily El Tiempo, and several other Spanish-language media. Victoria Amelima “is in critical condition, injured in the skull”, adds the text. MM. Abad and Jaramillo, sympathizers of the Ukrainian cause, were staying in eastern Ukraine to “express to the Ukrainian people the solidarity of Latin America against barbarism and the illegal invasion led by Russia”, adds the text, which emphasizes that “attacks on civilian places are an act of barbarism”.
An AFP reporter at the scene of the strike saw ambulances, police, soldiers and the mayor of the city near this restaurant, in front of which a crowd of residents gathered.
A chef in a dust-covered uniform, Rouslan, 32, said there were “quite a lot of people” in the restaurant at the time of the strike, pointing to the sky: “I had luck. »
Natalia, a woman standing outside, said her half-brother, 23-year-old Nikita, was inside in the pizza-making area. “They can’t get it out (from the debris), it was covered. Tiles fell on him,” she added, in tears.
Kramatorsk, a city of 150,000 inhabitants before the war, is the last major city under Ukrainian control in the East. It is located about thirty kilometers from the front.