Shocking CCTV footage captures the moment Russian rockets hit a DIY hypermarket in Kharkiv, resulting in at least 14 deaths and numerous injuries.
Russia claims the Epicentre outlet was a military target associated with Ukrainian military intelligence.
However, the video shows a typical store selling DIY equipment and household items, like toilets and sinks, when one of two Russian-guided bombs suddenly explodes through the roof, appearing to be a terrorist attack on civilians in eastern Ukraine.
An eight-year-old boy named Mykhailo was tragically photographed giving a DNA sample to help identify his father, who is among seven people still missing in the rubble and feared dead.
Serhiy Bolvinov, head of the regional police investigative department, said: ‘It is clear that people were completely unprepared for such an attack, they were at work and minding their own business.
‘Investigators and criminologists were looking for something that can be recognised as a human body all night long in this charred area, the ruins of the Epicentre. We are afraid that we will have to sift through the ashes in order to find the remains and identify the dead.’
One comment on the cruel strike said: ‘As usual, [the Russians] are taking revenge on civilians for the failure of the offensive in the Kharkiv region. They take out their anger. Russia is a scum state.’
‘Some workers died because they were evacuating people,’ said the director of the construction hypermarket.
A Russian source posted that this was not a regular DIY store but ‘a military base with weapons. All employees serve in the Main Intelligence Directorate, only military personnel are visitors.’
The footage immediately before the strike appears to dispel this theory with toilets, sinks, taps and other normal household goods plainly in view.
A Russian source had said: ‘The tactic of human shields is being used in Kharkiv. They [the Ukrainians] have set up a military camp and a command post in a shopping centre, which was discovered by our intelligence service.’
One witness said: ‘There were many families in the Epicentre. People came to buy because the summer season has started.’ Some 200 people were in the store, according to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. The attack was ‘another manifestation of Russian madness’, he said.
