Volodymyr Zelensky vowed on Thursday to get justice for all the victims of Vladimir Putin’s “terror” in Ukraine as the death toll from the missile strike in Kramatorsk rose to 12.
Rescuers pulled another body from the ruins of a restaurant in eastern Ukraine’s city of Kramatorsk, said emergency services.
Three children, including twin sisters, were among the dead, while 60 more people were wounded, according to local authorities.
In his overnight address, Mr Zelensky said: “No matter what the occupiers try to do against us and no matter what kind of terror they use, they will not be able to break Ukraine.
“They will not succeed in knocking us off the path that leads the occupiers to accountability for everything they have done against us and that leads us to our guaranteed security and lasting freedom.”
The Ukrainian president added: “Ukraine and everyone in the world who stands with us in defence of freedom will also stand in defence of justice. Justice for all those whose lives were taken by Russian terror, whose fate was broken by the Russian war.
“Eternal memory to all our people, to all Ukrainian children who were killed by Russian savages!”
The attack on the crowded restaurant in Kramatorsk on Tuesday was the latest Russian strike on civilian areas of the war-torn country.
Twin sisters Anna and Yulia Aksenchenko, 14, were among the dead.
They would have turned 15 in September, Kramatorsk city council’s education department said in a Facebook post under a picture of the two girls smiling for the camera.
Asked about the attack on Kramatorsk, the Kremlin said on Wednesday that Russia attacked only military targets, not civilian ones.
The claim flies firmly in the face of the reality on the ground.
Russia’s Defence Ministry later said a temporary Ukrainian army command post had been hit in Kramatorsk.
During the overnight rescue, police and soldiers emerged with a man in military trousers and boots on a stretcher. He was placed in an ambulance, though it was unclear whether he was still alive. Two men screamed in frenzied tones for a tow rope, then ran back towards the rubble.
Russia has frequently hit Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv, since its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Kramatorsk has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.
A missile strike killed 63 people at a railway station there in April 2022, one of the worst single air strikes of the war.
On the frontline, Ukrainian forces conducted counter-offensive operations in at least four sectors of the front on Wednesday, including in the western Zaporizhzhia area, in the western part of the Donetsk province, around the eastern town of Bakhmut, and in the Luhansk province, south of Kreminna, according to the Washington-based Institute for The Study of War.
