Global Courant
As it happens6:21Russian missile hit Ukrainian restaurant in ‘blink of an eye’, survivor says
The atmosphere in a restaurant in eastern Ukraine was casual and relaxed on Tuesday night, until a Russian missile hit.
The attack killed at least 11 people — including three teenagers — at Ria, a restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk that was a popular haunt for residents, foreign aid workers and journalists covering the war.
“It was like a peaceful scene with people chatting, like sitting and having fun,” Wojciech Grzedzinski, a Polish photographer who was there when the bomb hit, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“Nobody would think this kind of thing could happen.”
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Grzedzinski says Ria was busy when the rocket hit. He was sitting at his table enjoying the evening when he suddenly felt what he described as a “shock wave.”
“It was just a moment. It was just a blink of an eye, and everything happened,” he said.
Before he could comprehend what had happened, he was lying on the floor between his table and the couch he had been sitting on, surrounded by chaos and rubble. While searching for his camera, he saw a leg sticking out of the rubble.
Russia has maintained throughout the war that it does not target civilians, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated that claim on Wednesday.
That is what the United Nations estimates more than 20,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia invaded the country last February.
Dozens injured, 1 arrested
The attack left 61 injured, the National Police of Ukraine said. As of Wednesday afternoon, officials were still searching the rubble for survivors and bodies.
The missile also damaged 18 multi-storey buildings, 65 houses, five schools, two kindergartens, a shopping mall, an administrative building and a recreation building, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
“Everything was blown out there,” Valentyna, a 64-year-old woman who refused to give her last name, told Reuters at the scene of the attack. “None of the glass, windows or doors are left. All I see is destruction, fear and terror. This is the 21st century.”
The aftermath of the rocket hitting a busy restaurant. (Head of the Donetsk Regional Military-Civil Administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko/Facebook/Reuters)
Among the victims are twin sisters Anna and Yulia Aksenchenko, who would have turned 15 in September, Ukraine’s defense ministry said. who shared a photo of the smiling girls.
A 17-year-old, who has not been publicly identified, was also killed, Attorney General Andrii Kostin said.
Ukraine’s security service arrested an employee of a gas transportation company on Wednesday, accusing him of filming the restaurant for Russians and informing them of its popularity. They provided no evidence for allegations.
“There were no military targets,” says survivor
Russia, which has faced internal conflict after a state-affiliated group of mercenaries staged a short-lived armed uprising over the weekend, said on Wednesday it had attacked a Ukrainian army command post in Kramatorsk on Wednesday.
Grzedzinski says he finds the Russian story hard to believe.
“There were no military targets around this restaurant, just civilian buildings,” he said. “This restaurant was a target and that’s it. You know, there’s no other explanation.”
The strike was one of many strikes in Ukraine late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Russian troops shelled 16 settlements in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine’s presidential office reported, and a second rocket hit a village on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, injuring four people.
The Ukrainian government says 14-year-old sisters Anna and Yulia Aksenchenko were among those killed in a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk on Tuesday. (@DefenceU/Twitter)
Kramatorsk is located in Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed last September, but does not fully control.
The Kremlin is demanding that Kiev recognize the annexations, while Kiev has ruled out talks until Russian troops withdraw from all occupied territories.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late-night video message Tuesday that the attacks showed that Russia “deserved only one thing as a result of what it did: a defeat and a tribunal.”
Grzedzinski, meanwhile, says he still struggles with what he went through.
It is “pure luck” that he survived, he said.
“If I had chosen a different table, we probably wouldn’t be talking right now.”
With files from Reuters and The Associated Press. Interview with Wojciech Grzedzinski produced by Chris Harbord
