At least 16 people dead in strike on Ukrainian mall

Five people are crammed into a room in a Ukrainian intensive care unit, with their wounds bound up in bloodied bandages.

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A body is covered in a blanket on a stretcher outside.

This is the wake of a missile strike on a busy shopping mall in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday, south-east of Kyiv, one of the patients described as hell According to Ukraine's emergency services, the strike has killed at least 16 people and injured 59.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the deputy director of the surgery department at Kremenchuk's public hospital, Oleksandr Kovalenko, said: This is the sixth time the city has been bombed. He said the hospital was treating 25 people injured in the attack, with six of them in critical condition.

The strike resulted in a global outcry, with leaders of the G 7 major democracies gathered for a summit in Germany, condemning it as abominable. This is not an accidental strike, this is a calculated Russian strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

He said that the death count could go up.

He estimated that around 1,000 people were in the mall at the time of the strike.

Before the invasion, the city had a population of 217,000.

The morning after the blast, people lined up at a hotel near the mall to register the names of those missing.

More than 40 people have been reported missing, Ukraine's Prosecutor-General's office said.

Rescue workers sift through the rubble looking for survivors.

Inside the mall during the strike.

One patient in the hospital's general ward, Ludmyla Mykhailets, 43, said she was shopping at an electronics store with her husband, Mykola, when the blast threw her into the air.

I flew, head-first, and splinters hit my body. She said the whole place was collapsing, she said. She said she had broken her arm and split her head open.

I landed on the floor and I don't know if I was conscious or unconscious. Mykola, 45, said it was hell. Mykola, 45, blood seeping through a bandage wrapped around his head.

A small group of mall workers were filled with worry and grief, but also relief.

When an air-raid siren struck, they had made their way to a nearby basement when the missiles struck, said Roman, 28, who asked to be identified by only one name.

He said that many others had stayed inside as the mall's management had allowed shops to remain open during air raid sirens three days ago.

Many Ukrainians stopped reacting to the now-regular warning sirens, as strikes have been less frequently occurring outside Ukraine's battle-torn east.

Yulia, a 21-year-old woman covered in deep cuts, said Monday that Monday was her first day working in one of the mall stores.