By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih was doing what shopping centres do on a Friday — people buying groceries, running errands — when Russian drones slammed into it. Sixteen people were killed, according to The Guardian's reporting on the strike.
The city is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown, and he called the strike "cynical and despicable." The European Union's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, went further, describing it as "terror by design" and announcing she would put forward what she called the most far-reaching package of Russia sanctions since the war began, when EU foreign ministers meet in Ireland next month.
This account of the strike and death toll rests on a single Guardian report; the Press could not independently confirm the figures. There is no independent confirmation offered in available reporting of Russia's stated military rationale, if any, for the strike, nor of a Russian government response to the casualty toll. What is documented is the death count as reported and the reactions from Kyiv and Brussels. Kallas's promise of sanctions is, for now, a promise — the specifics of what a "far-reaching" package would include have not yet been detailed publicly, and sanctions packages have a long history of being announced with more force than they are ultimately enforced.
The attack adds one more entry to a war now well into its third year, one where the targeting of civilian infrastructure — shopping centres, apartment blocks, energy grids — has become a recurring, grim feature rather than an aberration. For a family in Kryvyi Rih, that pattern offers no comfort tonight.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."