Rescuers dig through Ukraine mall wreckage as Zelensky condemns ‘despicable’ Russian strike

Rescuers in Ukraine worked through the night to search for survivors in the wreckage of a shopping centre hit by a deadly Russian double-tap drone strike.

Sixteen people were killed and 130 injured in the busy mall in Kryvyi Rih on Friday, local officials said. Nine people are reportedly still missing, including two children.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the “cynical and despicable” attack was carried out in two waves, with the second strike targeting emergency workers at the scene.

Meanwhile, officials said at least two people had been killed by further Russian strikes overnight. The defence ministry in Moscow said it had targeted transport infrastructure and warehouses in the Kyiv region.

The death toll from Friday’s attack reached 16 after another body was retrieved from the rubble overnight, said regional military head Oleksandr Hanzha.

Twenty-three children were among those injured in the shopping centre in the Dnipropetrovsk region, he added, 14 of whom were among dozens of survivors still in hospital as of Saturday morning.

“Twenty-three [people] are in serious and extremely serious conditions, including three children – two boys aged 10 and 16 and an 11-year-old girl,” said Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the city’s defence council.

“All have undergone surgery, doctors are providing them with all the necessary assistance.”

Dramatic footage verified by the BBC showed the second drone hitting the already burning mall in Zelensky’s hometown. Russia’s military has not commented.

Vilkul said the drones had been flying at “extremely low altitudes”, describing the attackers as “animals”.

Rescue teams from seven other Ukrainian regions were urgently deployed to help search for survivors.

As rescue efforts continued early on Saturday, Zelensky said there had been “missile and drone strikes throughout the evening and night” across Ukraine, with residential buildings and civilian infrastructure damaged.

He said one person was killed and another injured after ballistic missile strikes damaged railway infrastructure in the capital Kyiv, while three people were injured by a “brutal” drone strike on a city minibus in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Regional officials earlier said at least one person had been killed by a Russian drone strike.

Ukraine’s military meanwhile said it had struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region overnight, causing a fire to break out.

Four people – including three children – were killed in separate Russian attacks in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region on Friday, and another two in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, local officials said.

And on Thursday 17 people were killed and more than 40 injured in a major Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.

Earlier on Friday, Ukraine’s military said it carried out strikes on an oil refinery and a military airfield deep inside Russia.

Ukraine has in recent months intensified attacks on Russian energy facilities, as well as on warehouses of the country’s largest online retailer Wildberries.

Kyiv describes them as legitimate targets because they help finance Russia’s war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and currently Moscow controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory in the south-east.