From the FB page; Stand With Ukraine

Olena Sokolova

June 29

According to Ukrainian tradition unmarried girls should be buried in wedding dresses. 👰‍♀️
These are 2 victims of #Kramatorsk russian terrorist attack – 14-year old twin sisters Anna and Yulia Aksenchenko. 😭 Their heartbroken mother is desperately trying to find wedding dresses for the funeral, but no wedding salon is open in Kramatorsk.
Russia brings death and destruction on Ukrainian land. ☠️

This selfie was made by the victim Yulia Aksenchenko.

“Mom is looking for wedding dresses for the funeral, but we don’t have any in the city now, no salon is working… 💔»

Quote of the teacher who taught in Anna and Julia Aksenchenko. The sisters were killed as a result of yesterday’s missile attack on Kramatorsk.

What horrors are again carrying Russia on our lands! 😭 The culprits should be found and punished..

📷 Photo: Julia Aksenchenko

Chilling update from #Kramatorsk. 💔
10 people killed , 61 injured. 😭
3 young girls among the killed civilians (17-year old and 14-year old twins). 8-month old baby injured 🤕.

RussiaIsATerroristState 😡

Olena Sokolova:

This is the price Ukrainian defenders are paying for freedom from Russia’s ‘brotherly love’. 🩸
Photo 📷 provided by Ukrainian military to Reporters.

………..

Here is what the Daily Telegraph had to say about this atrocity:

Truth about Russia’s deadly attack on pizza restaurant lies beneath the rubble

To Moscow, the Ria Lounge Bar strike was targeting ‘Nato mercenaries’ – but to Kyiv, it was another terrorist act against civilians

By Colin Freeman IN KRAMATORSK ; Joe Barnes and James Crisp

28 June 2023

In the words of Kremlin cheerleaders, it was a well-aimed strike at a “banqueting” site where Ukrainian troops and their Nato allies had come to drink, dine, and scheme.

It was hard to understand then, why Yuliya and Anna Aksenchenko were invited to the feast.

Far from being grizzled senior members of Kyiv’s military high command, the twin girls were 14-year-old pupils at Kramatorsk’s School No 24.

And rather than gathering to discuss military strategy against Russia, they’d been out with their dad for a slap-up meal at the Ria Lounge Bar in Kramatorsk, now reduced to smouldering wreckage.

Or so their father’s friend had told me on Tuesday night, as she anxiously watched rescue workers picking through the rubble of the restaurant after it was hit by an S-300 Russian missile at 7.30pm.

“I think they’ve picked him out of the wreckage already, but I haven’t seen any sign of the two girls yet,” she said, tears streaking down her face. “I am so worried.”

On Wednesday afternoon, her worst fears were proved true as the Aksenchenko twins were named as two of at least 11 people killed in the missile strike, which targeted the Donbas region’s most popular eatery. Another teenager aged 17 was also among the dead.

Russian sources parroted on state TV that it was a regular “banquet” spot for “Nato mercenaries”.

To Ukraine, it was yet another indiscriminate act of Russian terrorism.

“Russian missiles stopped the beating of the hearts of two angels,” the educational department of the Kramatorsk city council said.

The twins would have celebrated their 15th birthday in September, it said underneath a Facebook photo of the girls smiling together.

Rescuers with dogs had worked late into the night, sifting through the wreckage for bodies underneath a twisted web of metal beams.

The body of a boy was pulled from the mountain of rubble, Oleksandr Goncharenko, the mayor of Kramatorsk, said as search and rescue operations continued.

He did not give the boy’s age, but said emergency services had rescued at least seven survivors.

A 17-year-old girl was also killed and the death toll is expected to rise.

Rescue workers were seen carrying out men in military uniforms from the wreckage, but the majority of the victims were civilians.

At least 61 other people were injured in the attack, including an eight-month-old baby. By rights, the casualty count should have been at least two higher.

Half an hour before the missile hit, I was about to order pizza at the Ria Lounge, which was one of the few places in Kramatorsk still open after a year-and-a-half of war.

At 7pm, my translator and I got a phone call for an urgent interview on the other side of town. Despite our hunger, we abandoned our dinner plans and left the restaurant.

Had our contact not requested an impromptu meeting, we would otherwise have been mid-way through our main course as the missile landed.

We were not the only ones to have a narrow escape in a city in one of the four Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed last September but does not fully control.

Kramatorsk is a popular destination for Ukrainian soldiers enjoying respite from duties on the front lines in Donbas, as well as with foreign aid workers and journalists.

Two Dutchmen, who had been handing out French fries in the war-torn country, reportedly survived the strike with some cuts and scrapes.

Franky van Hintum, one of the pair, said: “We had just finished eating and had already asked for the bill when suddenly there was a gigantic bang. 

“As part of the restaurant collapsed and splinters of the glass facade flew in all directions from the air pressure, there was screaming and blood everywhere.”

Among those who were not so lucky was the restaurant’s manager, a friendly man in his 30s whom we had a chance to speak to in the entrance lobby.

On Wednesday, his friends posted a tribute to him on local social media, describing him as “the best of the best as a friend, coach and manager”.

In another twist in this tragic tale, Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it detained an alleged Russian agent suspected of helping Moscow’s forces correct fire to hit the restaurant.

The man, who was not named by Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the intelligence outfit, lived in Kramatorsk and worked at a local gas logistics firm.

Kramatorsk has been a frequent target of Russian attacks, with a strike on the town’s railway station in April 2022 killing 63 people.

The latest strike damaged 18 multi-storey buildings, 65 houses, five schools, two nurseries, a shopping centre, an administrative building and a recreational building.

Officials initially blamed the strike in Kramatorsk on an S-300 missile, a surface-to-air weapon that Russia’s forces have repurposed for loosely targeted strikes on cities.

However, the National Police later said that Iskander short-range ballistic missiles were used.

A second missile had hit a village on the fringes of Kramatorsk – which lies west of the front lines in Donetsk province and would be a likely objective in any westward advance by Russia – wounding four people.

Volodymyr Zelensky said that “defeat and a tribunal” were all Russia deserved in his nightly speech after the bloody attack, adding it to the long list of war crimes that the Ukrainian president has accused Vladimir Putin of.

Russia’s defence ministry later claimed that a temporary Ukrainian army command post had been hit in Kramatorsk. The Kremlin insists it never intentionally targets civilians.

Moscow has stepped up its air campaign in Ukraine while fighting continues along the front line after putting down a short-lived weekend mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner private army of prison recruits and other mercenaries.

On Tuesday and overnight, Russian forces also shelled 16 settlements in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the Ukrainian presidential office reported in the days after Putin’s grip on power was seriously challenged for the first time.

Moscow demanded that Kyiv recognises the annexation of the occupied territories and Ukrainian-held parts of the region, such as Kramatorsk, have suffered vicious Russian bombardment.

But even for a city close to the front line, the attack on the Ria – and the loss of four teenagers and children enjoying a simple slice of pizza – was shockingly violent and particularly heartbreaking.