Russian forces continued their intensified offensive against Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, where officials said a shell struck a building-materials store on May 25, killing at least six people and trapping dozens of others, while surrounding villages reported damage and injuries under a hail of drone and missile attacks.
Mayor Ihor Terekhov said a shell appeared to hit a massive shopping area in a residential zone in Ukraine’s second-largest city, leaving a “large number” of people missing and injured.
In a Telegram posting, he said preliminary information indicated the blast “occurred in a construction hypermarket.”
“It is already known that two [workers] are dead. We have a large number of people missing. Many wounded…It’s pure terrorism,” he said.
RFE/RL Ukrainian Service correspondents filmed first responders rushing to the scene as thick smoke was billowing from the hypermarket. People were seen running away from the site, at least one of them visibly suffering from injuries.
Officials later raised the death toll to six, with at least 40 injured and 16 missing.
A woman who identified herself as Lyubov told the AFP news agency that she was working as a cleaner at the hypermarket when a massive explosion occurred.
“It happened all of a sudden,” she said. “We didn’t understand at first. Everything went dark and everything started falling on our heads.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said dozens of people may have been in the store when the shells hit.
“As of now, we know that more than 200 people could have been inside the hypermarket,” Zelenskiy said on Telegram.
“This blow to Kharkiv is another manifestation of Russian madness,” Zelenskiy said.
The details could not immediately be independently verified.
The Russian state-run TASS news agency cited a security source as saying, without providing evidence, that there was a “military store and command post” inside the hypermarket.
Russia has denied it targets civilian areas, despite widespread proof of such actions.
Western and Ukrainian military experts say the Kremlin’s latest offensive is aimed at stretching Ukrainian forces to the breaking point in the northeast and moving Russian forces to within artillery range of Kharkiv, a city of some 1.4 million people.
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Separately, Oleh Synyehubov, governor the Kharkiv region, said at least five people were injured in the village of Kupyansk-Vuzloviy and that an emergency vehicle had been damaged in a Russian missile strike.
Two days earlier, Synyehubov said at least seven people were killed in Kharkiv in a wave of Russian strikes that Zelenskiy called “extremely brutal.”
In his nightly video address of May 24, Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had recaptured some territory in the region, although details are difficult to pin down given the heavy fighting there.
Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Western allies to step up deliveries of air defense weapons and other armaments to aid their outmanned and outgunned forces, especially in the country’s northeast.
In Russia, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov claimed that Ukrainian rockets had killed three people in residential districts of two villages in the area.
Kyiv did not comment on the reports but has insisted it does not target civilian areas. In recent months, several fuel depots and military sites inside Russia have been hit by missies, often in the Belgorod region near the border.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview published on May 24 in The Economist that Ukraine should be allowed to use Western-supplied weapons in strikes against military targets inside Russia.
The NATO head called on members to “consider whether they should lift” their current restrictions, saying they make it “very hard” for Ukraine to defend itself.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian media reported that at least 28 Ukrainian commanders are facing criminal probes over perceived military failures amid Russia’s intensified offensive operations near Kharkiv.
The reports said the investigations are being carried out by Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations and focus on allegations of failing to properly organize defenses along the border with Russia.
Ukrainian forces have been under immense pressure since Russia launched a surprise offensive on the Kharkiv region beginning May 10, shelling border settlements and attempting to capture Vovchansk, a small town just 5 kilometers from the Russian border.
Thousands of civilians have been evacuated during the offensive, and Ukrainian troops have been forced to pull back amid heavy losses to better-defended lines.
The reports said the 28 officers being investigated are at the command level of the 125th Brigade, the 415th Rifle Battalion, the 23rd Mechanized Brigade, and other units.
Neither the Ukrainian government nor the country’s military have commented on the reports.
On the diplomatic front, G7 finance ministers meeting in northern Italy said some “progress” has been made in finding ways to use profits from frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine.
“We are making progress in our discussions on potential avenues to bring forward the extraordinary profits stemming from immobilized Russian sovereign assets to the benefit of Ukraine, consistent with international law and our respective legal systems,” ministers said in a draft statement seen by the AFP news agency.
