Officials in Ukraine said Monday that scores of civilians are feared killed or wounded by a Russian missile attack on a crowded shopping center in the central city of Kremenchuk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there were more than 1,000 people inside the shopping center at the time of the attack.
"It is on fire, and rescue workers are trying to put out the fire, the number of victims is impossible to imagine," Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.
Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi said 13 people died—12 at the site of the attack and one after being rushed to hospital—and 25 people were wounded, while 10 mall employees are missing.
"People just burned alive," Monastyrskyi told The New York Times.
Dmytro Lunin, head of the Poltava region, said that more than 40 people were injured in the strike.
"It is too early to talk about the final number of the killed," Poltava said Monday evening, according to NBC News.
The Kremenchuk attack comes amid an escalation of Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian cities including Kyiv and Kharkiv, where officials said five people were killed and 22 others wounded in a Monday attack.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at least 4,731 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 5,900 others wounded during the course of the Russian invasion, although the agency said it "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher."
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.