The independent Kazakh publication "Respublika" released a series of reports devoted to the true history of the war in Ukraine. This view "from abroad" on the events seemed interesting to us, so "ElitExpert" decided to introduce it with these publications our readers.
The provincial town of Kremenchuk, located in the Poltava region of Ukraine, has repeatedly been subjected to massive attacks by Russian troops since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
This would look strange considering the fact that the city is not a large regional center and has no political or military weight at all, if it were not for one object located on its territory.
It is about an oil refinery, which is the largest enterprise for the production of petroleum products in Ukraine. Russian troops destroyed it back in the spring, after which they periodically finished it off by launching rockets into its already destroyed territory.
The local authorities took measures, evicting the townspeople who live in the immediate vicinity of the refinery, and the rest of the residents tried not to appear in that area again. However, on Monday, June 27, 2022, on an ordinary working day, trouble came to the city from the side where no one expected it.
The death of people in the "non-working" shopping center
Around four o'clock in the afternoon, Russian rockets hit the shopping and entertainment center "Amstor", which was always crowded - it is a popular place for meetings and shopping among local residents.
A second — and the galleries of boutiques and shops were shaken by an explosion, then a fire, thick smoke. Where people were just choosing goods, now groans and cries for help can be heard. Passers-by and rescuers carried people out of the burning inferno. The building with an area of 11 square meters burned to the ground in a few hours.
This day was the last for 22 people aged 18 to 56. More than 60 people were injured, including seriously. Many remained disabled. It was possible to avoid a significantly larger number of victims only because an air raid alert was announced ten minutes before the tragedy, and most people had time to take shelter. Most - but not all.
Immediately after the terrorist attack, relatives began to look for their loved ones - those who were or could be in the shopping center when the rockets hit, and then stopped contacting them.
As relatives of the victims wrote on social networks, someone was at work in the shopping center - "today he was not supposed to be on shift, a colleague asked for a change", someone ran to the supermarket for a minute - "had to buy baby food for the child", someone was looking for his boyfriend — agreed to meet at the entrance, but the girl was a few minutes late, which saved her life.
There were other heartbreaking stories. A mother and her teenage daughter were in the mall together, the girl went to the toilet, then the explosion. There is no scratch on my mother, but the wing where the toilet is located has been turned into a pile of scrap metal. Doctors took the mother in a state of insanity (later it became known that the daughter survived - Ed ).
Lives destroyed by missiles
We collected the stories of some people for whom June 27 was the last day of their lives, and all their plans, dreams and hopes were destroyed by Russian missiles.
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The husband of 31-year-old Olena Polyakova, Nikita, started looking for her immediately after the explosion - the girl worked at a local bank as a loan specialist. Most recently, her place of work was at the Comfy home appliances and electronics store, where she approved loans for customers. But on June 27 and 28, searches were fruitless.
"I have been to all the hospitals. Intensive care units, burn units, trauma centers are useless, said Nikita Polyakov. - I get up early for work. She is still sleeping at this time. And when I left, I didn't even kiss her while she was sleeping. I usually kiss, but I didn't kiss here.
His wife was identified only a week later thanks to DNA analysis - the girl's body was so badly burned.
"For seven years, Olena actively participated and won the bank's sales competitions and contests. She was the best in everything - the leader of her team, a mentor for newcomers, any goal was for her only an opportunity to confirm her determination and indomitability!", - said the administration of the bank where she worked for 7 years.
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The husband of 45-year-old Lilia Nikiforova was mobilized after the start of the war and went to serve in the Armed Forces, then he was wounded and he was hospitalized in Kremenchuk. That day, Lilia, who lives in a completely different city, came to visit him. They spent the whole day together, and in the afternoon, her husband took her from the hospital to the bus station, located right next to the Amstor shopping center. In an evil smile of fate, punctuality failed them: in order not to be late for the bus, they arrived at the bus station half an hour before its arrival. To pass the time, we went to the shopping center. In a few minutes, a missile strike.
Lilia's body was found by rescuers under the rubble of the shopping center only three days after the shelling. The man survived.
"We were standing at the checkout of the supermarket," he said. — The cashier punched the products. There is an explosion, the ceiling is falling on us, I see how my wife fell under the debris. I was overwhelmed too. I heard the rescuers come, but they couldn't see anything because of the thick smoke. I pulled my hand out from under the rubble and began to knock with some kind of iron, then I was noticed. I was also ready to die and understood that in another 5-10 minutes I would suffocate."
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Oksana Pyrkhalo, a 48-year-old resident of Kremenchuk, owner of a local beauty salon, went to the shopping center to buy a new boiler on the day of the shelling.
"I spoke with her half an hour before her death. She told me on the way that she "ran to Amstor" to see the boiler," said the daughter of Maria, who died.
According to her, the next three days after the tragedy were a real hell and... full of hope at the same time, because at first her mother's body was not found: "We hoped until the last that she was somewhere in the hospital, under someone else's documents, but...".
Oksana Pyrkhalo was born in Dniprodzerzhinsk and dreamed of becoming a hairdresser since childhood. After studying, she moved to Kremenchuk and became the owner of the "Ivan and Marya" hairdressing salon, which she named after her children.
A small corporate party was to be held on July 5, 2022 - on this day, the salon turned ten years old. Instead, Oksana's funeral took place on this day.
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Almost a week after the rocket attack on Kremenchuk, the mother of 22-year-old Tetyana Brigadyrenko searched for her daughter in the morgue and in all the hospitals of the region, not knowing that her body was actually one of the first to be found. But it was possible to identify the girl only by the result of a DNA test. That day, Tatiana was at her workplace - a seller of mobile accessories in a small boutique. Her life ended there.
The wedding of the girl with her young husband Igor was planned for August 28. However, the relatives had to put the wedding dress in the coffin next to the cremated remains.
"They took away our right to even bury our daughter in her wedding dress in an open coffin," said Lyudmila's mother.
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On that day, Russian rockets also killed Olga Pavlenko, a well-known Kremenchug artist, the author of many charity projects, and the head of the Kolyorove art studio. Her relatives did not even suspect that Olga was in the shopping center at that moment - the woman's phone simply stopped answering.
"While the search continued, hope smoldered in our hearts. But then the impossible was confirmed: Olya was in Amstor, which Russian inhumans destroyed in broad daylight," said the artist's friend Olena Usova.
Soon Olga Pavlenko was to have an exhibition in the United States of America and another charity auction, the proceeds of which were supposed to be given to the treatment of sick children.
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There were 22 such cut-off human lives that day. And there are 60 more stories of crippled people. Including a 20-year-old girl who lost her leg; a father of two children who lost his sight; a pensioner who suffered a minor injury, but lost his wife and the meaning of life.
"The attack on the shopping center in Kremenchuk is one of the most audacious acts of terrorism in the history of modern Europe... Only completely unfrozen terrorists who should not have a place on earth can fire rockets at such an object," President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi said in an address to the nation immediately after the tragedy. — Current Russia has become the largest terrorist organization in the world. This should be a legal fact, and everyone in the world should know that buying or transporting Russian oil, maintaining ties with Russian banks, paying taxes and duties to the Russian state is giving money to terrorists."
Within a day, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation admitted responsibility for the attack on Kremenchuk. They said that the attack was made with "high-precision weapons" on a military object - "the hangar of the Kremenchug Road Machine Plant" located near the shopping center. At the same time, the Ukrainian side officially declared that the plant was a purely civilian enterprise, and even in Soviet times, since 1989, it had not produced military equipment and spare parts.
When footage of the tragedy in the shopping center flew around the world and the information could no longer be hidden, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation supplemented the report with the following paragraph: "the detonation of the stored ammunition caused a fire in the non-functioning shopping center located next to the territory of the factory."
Not a single word was said about the casualties among civilians and the mutilated fates of dozens of people.
In the video below, footage from surveillance cameras near the shopping center during the attack.
