Drones struck a shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih. Fifteen people are dead, a hundred and thirty injured, and among the injured are twenty-three children. Twenty-nine are in serious condition. Some people are still listed as missing.

The time of day tells the whole story: around 16:30 in the afternoon. Not at night, not over a military base, not over a barracks. In the afternoon, in a shopping centre, at the hour when the most people are inside.

The second strike is the one to remember

The first wave of drones hit, and firefighters and rescuers arrived at the scene. Half an hour later came the second strike - while the rescue teams were already there. According to local authorities, the second strike was carried out with a jet-powered Shahed flying at extremely low altitude.

That is not a miss. That is a tactic with a name - striking the people who came to help. The Balkans know this scene from their own past and need nobody to explain it.

"An absolutely cynical and shameless attack on an ordinary shopping centre," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was born in this very city. The head of Kryvyi Rih's defence council, Oleksandr Vilkul, was shorter: "Damned bloody Russian scum."

The target was not accidental

Ukraine's human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said Russia deliberately strikes places where people gather, and does so during the daytime. This is not an accusation thrown into the air - it is a claim about a pattern, and a pattern is what separates a mistake from a decision.

Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi reported that the fire engulfed one third of the total area of the shopping and entertainment centre. Firefighting was hampered because the threat of another strike persisted the whole time. Imagine that calculation: entering a burning building knowing a second drone could arrive while you are inside.

This city has been through this before

Kryvyi Rih is not new to the list. On 4 April 2025, an attack on this city killed nineteen people, nine of them children, and injured seventy-five. Less than a year and a half later, in the same city, the method of striking is repeating itself.

Every new figure from an attack like this appears in the news, lasts a day and then disappears. The question that remains is not how many people died - we already know that. The question is who will answer for the decision to send the second drone half an hour after the first, when it was already known who was there.