Russian strike on Ukrainian shopping center kills 18

The death toll from a Russian missile strike on the day before rose to 18, the city s mayor said on Tuesday morning, as emergency workers combed through the rubble of a destroyed shopping mall in central Ukraine. Vitaliy Maletskiy, the mayor, wrote on Facebook that fifty-nine people remained wounded and another 36 were still missing. Hundreds of people had been inside the mall. Ukraine's top prosecutor, Irina Venediktova, arrived on the scene Tuesday with a team of investigators to collect evidence about what she said constituted a war crime under Ukrainian law and a crime against humanity.

The prosecutor denounced what she described as the systematic shelling of civilian infrastructure: hospitals, kindergartens, malls, and more. Ms. Venediktova said that Russians know very well that they are killing civilians. A makeshift memorial of 16 vases filled with flowers had been set up in a small park next to the shopping center. Somber visitors lit candles for the dead. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an evening video address that the strike was intentional. This is not an accidental hit - this is a calculated Russian strike, he said.

This was the sixth and most deadly Russian missile strike on Kremenchuk, an industrial city with a pre-war population of 217,000. Many displaced people have arrived from places further east that have been hit by heavy bombardment, such as Kharkiv and Mariupol, although some residents have left.

One of the wounded in Monday's strike was Yulia, 22, who had fled to Kremenchuk from Kharkiv with her mother. They previously lived in Luhansk, a city occupied by Russian-backed separatists in 2014. After the earlier fighting, Yulia and her mother, Larisa, fled to Kharkiv, and then fled to Kremenchuk two months ago because of heavy shelling in Kharkiv. She had found a job selling mobile phones in the shopping center. "We hoped we would be safe here," said Larisa, who did not feel comfortable sharing her last name. This is a deep trauma for my soul. In the hours after the strike, pro-Moscow news outlets and social media channels were quick to dismiss the attack as staged by the Ukrainians. Larisa said he wanted the world to know that this is not fake. People suffered, and it is very scary.