Ukraine war: Russian missile ‘designed to bring down a plane’ hits crowded pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk

Published

2 years ago

June 28, 2023

admin

At least 10 people have been killed – including children – and 61 injured after a Russian missile struck a pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region.

A second missile hit a village on the fringes of the city, injuring five people.

“Russia doesn’t hit civilians only military targets,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told Sky News, while Russian state TV explained the missile attacks, saying they were aimed at “NATO instructors” and that “the objective was achieved”. It presented no evidence to justify that claim.

WARNING: This story contains distressing content

“I ran here after the explosion because I rented a cafe here… Everything has been blown out there,” a woman in Kramatorsk told Reuters news agency.

“None of the glass, windows or doors are left. All I see is destruction, fear and horror.”

Russia-Ukraine war latest: Putin was stopped from ‘wiping out’ Wagner boss

Officials said three girls – two sisters aged 14, and a 17-year-old – were among those killed in the explosion.

The city’s mayor, Oleksandr Goncharenko, said the body of a boy was pulled from the rubble on Wednesday morning. He did not give the child’s age.

“It is with sadness and unbearable pain that we report the death of two Aksenchenko sisters, Yuliya and Anna, students of Kramatorsk Primary School No. 24,” the city’s education department said in a statement.

“This year they graduated from the eighth grade, and on 4 September they should have celebrated their 15th anniversary, a Russian rocket stopped the beating of the hearts of two angels.”

Images showed the building reduced to a twisted web of metal beams with rescue teams searching the area for survivors.

The missile strike occurred on Tuesday evening in a busy shopping area – and the pizza restaurant was reported to be popular with journalists.

A freelance journalist said he was in the RIA pizza restaurant 10 minutes before it was hit.

Arnaud De Decker said that an hour after the explosions, he could still hear “people screaming underneath the rubble”.

He shared a photo of his meal on social media about 20 minutes before the attack took place.

‘Eight-month-old baby injured in explosion’

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, said emergency services were trying to establish the total number of casualties.

“This is the city centre. These were public eating places crowded with civilians,” he told Ukrainian television.

Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska also condemned the attack.

“Crowded place, evening – enemy do not want normal life in Ukraine,” she wrote on Twitter.

“There are a lot of wounded. It is painful.”

Ukraine’s defence ministry shared footage showing the extensive damage to local buildings and a distressed mother looking for her missing daughter, who she said worked in the restaurant that was hit.

In a statement it said: “Russia is still targeting civilians in Ukraine.”

It said children were among the dead, and an infant was injured in the blast.

Russian missile ‘designed to bring down a plane’ hit pizzeria

Sky News’ international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn said the restaurant was popular with locals and well known to foreign journalists who would often stop there on their way to the frontline.

He said an eight-month-old baby is one of the dozens injured.

“For some reason, someone in the Russian military thought it would be a good idea to fire an S-300, a surface-to-air missile,” Waghorn said.

“That’s a missile that’s seven metres long, packed with explosives, normally fired from the back of a truck and designed to bring down a plane.

“It’s a pretty accurate bit of ammunition. So they probably knew exactly what they were firing at and unless there was a military justification for attacking a pizza restaurant, which almost certainly there wasn’t, this is an alleged war crime.”

‘Where everybody ate. Where they came to feel normal’

By Katy Scholes, Sky News producer

My Ukrainian colleague sent me a picture on WhatApp, a blown-out building both familiar and unrecognisable. The doors we walked through just weeks earlier had been ripped from their hinges; the windows now great big holes laden with the ordinary things you usually find inside a restaurant.

In a video I saw later, a dusty credit card machine rested on a windowsill and reminded me of the young, smiling staff we got to know.

Pizza RIA wasn’t the only restaurant open in Kramatorsk but it was considered the best one. It had the highest reviews on Google so people flocked there – locals, journalists, and off-duty soldiers.

Back in the early days of the invasion, almost everything in Kramatorsk was closed and most people had left. The city was under direct fire and direct threat.

After the Kharkiv counteroffensive pushed the Russians back out of artillery range from the city, in time, things started to re-open. People came back.

There’s pleasure in watching life returning to a place. That’s what we saw and felt when we worked from Kramatorsk six weeks or so ago, the last time we visited Pizza RIA.

There was a birthday party that day. Women tottered past us in their highest heels and most glamorous dresses clutching silvery gifts. Some held the hands of children as they went by. A kids’ entertainer dressed as a giant teddy bear bumped about with a stitched scar on his forehead – like everyone else in this place, he’d been in the wars.

Kramatorsk is now about 30km from the nearest fighting but the sound of shells is never far. This was a place where people came to feel normal. Pizza RIA was not a military target.

This is a grim reminder that for civilians living near the frontline, there is no escape from the war.

Russia denies targeting civilians

Asked about the attack in Kramatorsk, 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.”

“Strikes are carried out on objects that are connected with military infrastructure in one way or another,” Mr Peskov told reporters on Wednesday.

Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians since invading Ukraine on 24 February last year.

The Russian strikes are among the first since an aborted mutiny at the weekend.

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he let the armed march on Moscow by the Wagner mercenaries go on as long as it did to avoid bloodshed, while the group’s boss Yevgeny Prigozhin who led the uprising has said he never intended to overthrow the government.

Russian authorities say they have closed a criminal investigation into the uprising and are pressing no armed rebellion charge against Prigozhin or his followers.

World

Why hastily declared ceasefires tend to be fragile

Published

1 day ago

June 24, 2025

admin

Why hastily declared ceasefires tend to be fragile

Ceasefires that are suddenly declared tend to be pretty fragile.

Stable ceasefires usually require a lot of preparation so that everyone on both sides knows what is supposed to happen, and – more importantly – when.

And they normally agree on how it will be monitored so one side cannot seize a quick advantage by breaking it suddenly.

Israel-Iran live updates: Trump swears live on camera as he rages at Israel and Iran

Without such preparations, and sometimes even with them, ceasefires will tend to be breached – perhaps by accident, perhaps because one side does not exercise full control over its own forces, perhaps as a result of false alarms, or even because a third party – a guerrilla group or a militia, say – choose that moment to launch an attack of their own.

The important question is whether a ceasefire breach is just random and unfortunate, or else deliberate and systemic – where someone is actively trying to break it.

Either way, ceasefires have to be politically reinforced all the time if they are to hold.

All sides may need to rededicate themselves to it at regular intervals, mainly because, as genuine enemies, they won’t trust each other and will remain naturally suspicious at every twitch and utterance from the other side.

This is where an external power like the United States plays a critical part.

If enemies like Israel and Iran naturally distrust each other and need little incentive to “hit back” in some way at every provocation, it will take US pressure to make them abide by a ceasefire that may be breaking down.

Appeals to good nature are hardly relevant in this respect. An external arbiter has to make the continuance of a ceasefire a matter of hard national interest to both sides.

And that often requires as much bullying as persuasion. It may be true that “blessed are the peacemakers”.

World

Five key takeaways from Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s interview with Sky News

Published

1 day ago

June 24, 2025

admin

Five key takeaways from Volodymyr Zelenskyy's interview with Sky News

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has given a wide-ranging interview to Sky News in which he was asked about the prospect of Russia attacking NATO, whether he would cede land as part of a peace deal and how to force Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

The Ukrainian president spoke to chief presenter Mark Austin.

Here are the five key takeaways from their discussion.

NATO ‘at risk of attack’

Mr Zelenskyy said plans for NATO members to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 are “very slow” and warned Russia could attack a NATO country within five years to test the alliance.

“We believe that, starting from 2030, Putin can have significantly greater capabilities,” he said. “Today, Ukraine is holding him up, he has no time to drill the army.”

But while Mr Zelenskyy conceded his ambition to join NATO “isn’t possible now”, he asserted long term “NATO needs Ukrainians”.

US support ‘may be reduced’

Asked about his views on the Israel-Iran conflict, and the impact of a wider Middle East war on Ukraine, Mr Zelenskyy accepted the “political focus is changing”.

“This means that aid from partners, above all from the United States, may be reduced,” he said.

“He [Putin] will increase strikes against us to use this opportunity, to use the fact that America’s focus is changing over to the Middle East.”

On the subject of Mr Putin’s close relationship with Iran, which has supplied Russia with attack drones, Mr Zelenskyy said: “The Russians will feel the advantage on the battlefield and it will be difficult for us.”

Ukraine war latest: Kyiv launches attacks inside Russia

Trump and Putin ‘will never be friends’

Mr Zelenskyy was sceptical about Mr Putin’s relationship with Donald Trump.

“I truly don’t know what relationship Trump has with Putin… but I am confident that President Trump understands that Ukrainians are allies to America, and the real existential enemy of America is Russia.

“They may be short-term partners, but they will never be friends.”

On his relationship with Mr Trump, Mr Zelenskyy was asked about whether he felt bullied by the US president during their spat in the Oval Office.

👉 Follow Trump100 on your podcast app 👈

“I believe I conducted myself honestly. I really wanted America to be a strong partner… and to be honest, I was counting on that,” he said.

In a sign of potential frustration, the Ukrainian president added: “Indeed, there were things that don’t bring us closer to ending the war. There were some media… standing around us… talking about some small things like my suit. It’s not the main thing.”

Putin and peace talks

Mr Zelenskyy was clear he supported both a ceasefire and peace talks, adding that he would enter negotiations to understand “if real compromises are possible and if there is a real way to end the war”.

But he avoided directly saying whether he would be willing to surrender four annexed regions of Ukraine, as part of any peace deal.

“I don’t believe that he [Putin] is interested in these four regions. He wants to occupy Ukraine. Putin wants more,” he said.

“Putin is counting on a slow occupation of Ukraine, the reduction in European support and America standing back from this war completely… plus the removal of sanctions.

“But I think the strategy should be as follows: Pressure on Putin with political sanctions, with long-range weapons… to force him to the negotiating table.”

Russia ‘using UK tech for missiles’

On Monday, Mr Zelenskyy met Sir Keir Starmer and agreed to share battlefield technology, boosting Ukraine’s drone production, which Mr Zelenskyy described as a “strong step forward”.

But he also spoke about the failure to limit Russia’s access to crucial technology being used in military hardware.

He said “components for missiles and drones” from countries “including the UK” were being used by Russian companies who were not subject to sanctions.

“It is vitally important for us, and we’re handing these lists [of Russian companies] over to our partners and asking them to apply sanctions. Otherwise, the Russians will have missiles,” he added.

World

At least 25 people killed after Israeli forces open fire near aid trucks in Gaza, witnesses say

Published

1 day ago

June 24, 2025

admin

At least 25 people killed after Israeli forces open fire near aid trucks in Gaza, witnesses say

At least 25 people have been killed after Israeli forces opened fire towards people waiting for aid trucks in Gaza, according to witnesses and hospitals.

The Awda hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp, which received the victims, said the Palestinians were waiting for the trucks on a road south of Wadi Gaza.

Witnesses told the Associated Press (AP) news agency Israeli forces opened fire as people were advancing to be close to the approaching trucks.

Israel-Iran live updates: Trump tells two sides ‘do not violate’ ceasefire

The Awda hospital said another 146 Palestinians were wounded. Among them were 62 in a critical condition, who were transferred to other hospitals in central Gaza, it added.

In the central town of Deir al-Balah, the Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital said it received the bodies of six people who were killed in the same incident.

“It was a massacre,” one witness, Ahmed Halawa, said.

He said tanks and drones fired at people, “even as we were fleeing – many people were either martyred or wounded”.

Another witness, Hossam Abu Shahada, said drones were flying over the area, watching the crowds. Then there was gunfire from tanks and drones, leaving a “chaotic and bloody” scene as people attempted to escape.

He said he saw at least three people lying on the ground motionless and many others wounded as he fled.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the reports.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, described the aid delivery mechanism in Gaza as “an abomination that humiliates and degrades desperate people”.

He added: “It is a death trap, costing more lives than it saves.”

A spokesperson for the UN’s Human Rights Office said: “The weaponisation of food for civilians, in addition to restricting or preventing their access to life-sustaining services, constitutes a war crime and, under certain circumstances, may constitute elements of other crimes under international law.”

Around 56,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. The ministry says more than half of the dead were women and children, but does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count.

The war began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, when militants stormed across the border and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostages. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefire agreements.