The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Russia would halt its offensive as soon as Ukraine surrenders, urging Kyiv to order its troops to lay down their arms.
“The Ukrainian side can stop everything before the end of today,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“An order for the nationalist units to lay down their arms is necessary,” he said, adding Kyiv had to fulfil a list of Moscow’s demands.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged world powers to do their utmost to help end Russia’s intervention by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, firefighters and soldiers searched for survivors in the rubble of a shopping mall in central Ukraine on Tuesday after a Russian missile strike killed at least 16 people in an attack condemned by the United Nations and the West.
Family members of the missing lined up at a hotel across the street where rescue workers had set up a base after Monday’s strike on the busy mall in Kremenchuk, southeast of Kyiv.
More than a 1,000 people were inside when two Russian missiles slammed into the mall, President Zelensky said. At least 16 people were killed and 59 injured, Ukraine’s emergency services said.
“This is not an accidental hit, this is a calculated Russian strike exactly onto this shopping centre,” Mr. Zelensky said in an evening video address. He said the death count could rise.
More than 40 people had been reported missing, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said.
A survivor receiving treatment at Kremenchuk’s public hospital, Ludmyla Mykhailets, 43, said she was shopping with her husband when the blast threw her into the air.
“I flew head first and splinters hit my body. The whole place was collapsing,” she said.
“It was hell,” added her husband, Mykola, 45, blood seeping through a bandage wrapped around his head.
Russia has not commented on the strike but its deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, accused Ukraine of using the incident to gain sympathy ahead of a June 28-30 summit of the NATO alliance.
“One should wait for what our Ministry of Defence will say, but there are too many striking discrepancies already,” Polyanskiy wrote on Twitter.
The United Nations Security Council will meet Tuesday at Ukraine’s request following the attack. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the missile strike was “deplorable”.
“Russian President Putin and those responsible will be held to account,” they wrote in a joint statement tweeted by the German government spokesperson.
Battle for Lysychansk
Elsewhere on the battlefield, Ukraine endured another difficult day following the loss of the of Sievierodonetsk after weeks of bombardment and street fighting.
Russian artillery pounded Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk’s twin city across the Siverskyi Donets River. A missile strike on Tuesday killed eight and wounded 21 others in Lysychansk.
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