According to Ukrainian data, the attack was carried out with old Soviet missiles fired by strategic bombers.
Russian the defense ministry admitted on Tuesday that it had fired a missile on Monday at the town of Kremenchuk in central Ukraine. The attack destroyed a shopping center of more than 10,000 square meters, which, according to Ukrainian data, had more than a thousand people at the time of the incident.
News agency UKrinform said the number of victims on Tuesday afternoon was 18 dead and 36 people still missing. The clearing work on the shopping center continued. Among other things, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi and G7 leaders condemned Russia’s attack as a terrorist act.
In Russia, the Ministry of Defense presented its own version of events On its Telegram channel on tuesday. According to the explanation, Russia fired a missile at an airplane hangar located in the area of the Kremenchuk truck plant. According to the ministry, weapons and ammunition imported into Ukraine from the United States and Western Europe had been assembled in the hangar.
“An explosion in a munitions depot containing western weapons caused a fire in a decommissioned shopping mall near the factory site,” Major General, Department of Defense Communications Igor Konashenkov said at a news conference in Moscow.
Yet on Monday, a key argument from Russian representatives was that the blow to the mall was staged in Ukraine. This argument was among the first to be made by Russia’s deputy UN envoy Dmitri Poljanskithat Ukraine would seek attention during the Madrid NATO summit.
Department of Military Strategy Teacher, Captain Antti Pihlajamaa The National Defense College estimates that missile shots fired remotely across Ukraine have increased slightly in recent days.
“They may join the ongoing G7 and NATO summits, but I’m not sure if the attacks have anything to do with them,” says Pihlajamaa.
“If the target has been deliberately shot, then perhaps it has been desired to defeat the will of the Ukrainians to defend the country by showing that ‘no one and nothing is safe’.”
“An explanation can also be found in the logic of the war,” Pihlajamaa reflects.
“But I can’t come up with any specific military reason for the attack on a single mall.”
Russian and the data published by Ukraine in any case suggest that the destruction of the shopping center may have been a matter of missteps by the Russian Air Force. The reason may be that old and inaccurate weapons have been dug up for use as missile stockpiles run out.
According to information released by the Ukrainian armed forces on Monday, Russia would have struck with H-22 missiles with a range of about 600 kilometers. According to Ukraine, the missiles would have been fired at the target from the air in the Kursk region on the Russian side. The plural form used by Ukraine suggests that at least two missiles were fired.
In Russian, the missile is called X-22, in English Kh-22. The Russian additional name for the missile is Burja or Storm. The missile was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and was introduced in the early 1970s.
The H-22 is a more than 11-meter stubble designed to be fired from a strategic Tu-22 bomber. According to videos circulating on social media in May, Russia would have used the missile, originally designed against naval paint, against Ukraine once before. There was no information on the target of the attack at that time.
American an air war expert Thomas Newdick published The Warzone in an online publication in May that the May attack was the first time strategic bombers had been used in the war in Ukraine.
According to Newdick, the manufacture of the missile was stopped as early as 1988. At least in the current sense, there is no H-22 precision weapon. Hit accuracy is about five miles, according to Newdick, meaning half of the missiles fired would hit a radius of less than five miles from the target.
The Kredmash car factory, mentioned by information officer Konashenkov, has also served the needs of the Ukrainian armed forces and, according to Russian data, vehicles previously damaged in the war in eastern Ukraine have been repaired there.
In addition to the car plant, Kremenchuk has a large oil refinery where Russia made a Russian Life news site according to the missile strike on the 18th of this month. Due to its location, Kremenchuk’s oil reserves may be important for Ukraine’s fuel supply on both the eastern and southern Ukrainian fronts.