A missile struck a popular pizza joint in the city of Kramatorsk in Ukraine Tuesday night. The Russian missile killed at least 11 people and injured at least 61 others who were inside the crowded restaurant.
According to CNN, a 17-year-old girl and 14-year-old twin sisters were among those killed in the attack. It was “the deadliest attack against civilians in months.”
“Russia deliberately targeted crowded areas,” Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, said on Telegram, per The Guardian.
Do we know who is responsible for the strike in Kramatorsk?
Search and rescue efforts are ongoing, and The New York Times reported that Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the S.B.U., says it “detained a man who allegedly helped direct the missile strike.” The man was living in Kramatorsk working for a gas transportation company, and is accused “of sending video footage of the restaurant to Russian military intelligence.”
Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson, alleges “Russia doesn’t aim at civilian targets,” but Russian “air strikes have killed many civilians” during the war, according to CNBC.
In April 2022, more than 60 civilians were killed in Kramatorsk following a missile strike attack on the city’s train station, BBC reported. And in June of last year, Russian shelling struck a shopping center in Kremenchuk and killed at least 18 people, per BBC.
“Each such manifestation of terror proves over and over again to us and the whole world that Russia deserves only one thing as a result of everything it has done — defeat and a tribunal, fair and legal trials against all Russian murderers and terrorists,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in Tuesday’s nightly address, per The Guardian.