Airstrike on occupied Kherson village shop kills 22 and injures 15

A missile strike on a shop in the village of Sadove in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region on Friday evening killed 22 people, according to the Russian-installed regional governor Volodymyr Saldo.

In addition to reporting the 22 dead, Saldo said that a further 15 people had been injured in the attack on the village shop, which had “a significant number of visitors and staff” in it at the time of the strike. Saldo blamed the attack on the Armed Forces of Ukraine, adding that it had revealed “Zelensky’s vile fascist nature”. 

Saldo, who was appointed to run the occupied Kherson region by Moscow following its partial occupation of the region in 2022, told Russian state television that the first strike on Sadove was carried out using a French-supplied guided aerial bomb, which was followed in quick succession with a US HIMARS missile.

“After the first arrival, people from neighbouring houses ran out to help the victims, after a short period of time there was an arrival of a HIMARS missile. Among the dead are two children,” Saldo wrote on Telegram.

The Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office on Saturday blamed the Russian military for the attack. “On 7 June 2024, at around 7pm, Russian troops shelled the temporarily occupied village of Sadove in the Skadovsk district of the Kherson region.”

“A pretrial investigation has been initiated into the violation of the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder,” the statement from the General Prosecutor’s Office read.