The toll of Russian strikes that destroyed a restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk rose on Wednesday to eleven dead and around sixty injured, with US President Joe Biden calling Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin a “pariah” whose army assures that ‘it does not aim at any civilian target in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced a “terrorist” attack, and announced the arrest on the spot of an individual who had “coordinated” the Russian shootings, in his daily speech Wednesday evening.
In this large city in the east of the country under Ukrainian control where the Russian strikes also hit homes, businesses, a post office and other buildings, “the bodies of 11 people (including 3 children) were taken out from the rubble, 56 people were injured (including 1 child),” the emergency services said on Telegram. Seven people were rescued alive.
Police say Russia fired two S-300 missiles – surface-to-air missiles it also uses for ground strikes – at Kramatorsk, which had a population of 150,000 before the war entered its sixteenth month.
“I was just in the neighborhood. My team and I were going about our business. We were in an apartment and we heard an explosion. I had a medical backpack with me, we took it out and we we left,” said Galyna, a female military doctor.
She says in particular that she had to rescue a victim who “suffers from an open wound in the head: his cranial box has entered his brain matter”.
“I didn’t have time to watch, I had to act,” she adds.
The Russian president is now “a pariah across the planet”, said Joe Biden in Washington.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have struck a “temporary deployment point” of the 56th Mechanized Infantry Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured that Russia “does not strike civil infrastructure”.
The strike destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant, a downtown establishment popular with journalists, aid workers and soldiers. Ukrainian media have mentioned the presence of foreign military instructors in town.
Three Colombian personalities, famous writer Hector Abad, politician Sergio Jaramillo and journalist Catalina Gomez, Ukraine correspondent for France 24, were slightly injured while dining in the restaurant with Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, according to a statement.
The latter, a 37-year-old novelist, “is in critical condition”, adds the text.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused Russia of “violating” the laws of war.
An AFP journalist 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 had gathered.
A chef in a dust-covered uniform, Rouslan, 32, said there were “quite a lot of people” at the time of the strike.
An important railway hub and home to military sites, Kramatorsk is very regularly targeted by Russian bombardments.
The deadliest was that of the train station, struck in April 2022, which left 61 dead and more than 160 injured a few weeks after the start of the Russian invasion and when a crowd of civilians tried to leave the city.
At the same time, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian forces Valery Zaluzhny assured that five days after the failed rebellion of the paramilitary group Wagner against Moscow, the counter-offensive in Kiev was following its course and recording “progress”.
“The enemy is putting up strong resistance, but at the same time suffering heavy losses,” he said in a Telegram message after a phone call with his American counterpart Mark Milley, as the effects on the military situation and on Russian power the events of the last few days in Russia are at the center of all questions.
Asked about a possible weakening of Vladimir Putin, US President Joe Biden replied: “It’s hard to say, but he is clearly losing the war.”
As for the destabilizing effects of the Wagner Rebellion – in whose secret New York Times sources said at least one senior Russian military official was – “a lot of people are speculating whether it’s over (or not), we we don’t know either,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.
However, he judges that Vladimir Putin, who said on Wednesday that he had “no doubts” of Russian support, is emerging “weakened” from the crisis.
From kyiv where he was on Wednesday with his Lithuanian counterpart, Polish President Andrzej Duda worried about the transfer, according to him, to Belarus of 8,000 fighters from the Wagner group.
“It is difficult for us to exclude that the presence of the Wagner group in Belarus could pose a threat,” he said.
He was joined by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who warned against any “threat” that Wagner’s presence in Belarus, bordering Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, would create, three member countries of the Alliance.
Under the terms of a negotiation led on Saturday by the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, this country offered to welcome the boss of Wagner Evgueni Prigojine as well as members of the paramilitary group involved in the rebellion.
Mr Lukashenko announced that the tempestuous boss of Wagner, who had evaporated since the announcement of the end of his rebellion on Saturday evening, after 24 hours of chaos which had seen his men seize military bases and march on Moscow before suddenly turning around, had arrived in the republic on Tuesday.
28/06/2023 22:36:31 – Kramatorsk (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP