(Reuters) – Russia’s emergencies ministry said its workers recovered the bodies of 20 people from rubble following a Ukrainian attack on a building housing a bakery in the city of Lysychansk in the occupied Luhansk region in Eastern Ukraine.
The ministry shared video of emergency workers lifting two bloodied people onto stretchers and carrying them in the darkness out of the ruins of a building.
The ministry said earlier that its workers rescued 10 people and handed them over to doctors.
From the design and color of the building and a sign matching images of the area, Reuters was able to confirm the location of a separate, daytime video shared by the emergencies ministry. It corresponds to a location on Google maps (NASDAQ:) identified as Ristorante Adriatico on Moskovska Street, Lysychansk.
However Reuters was unable to independently verify the date of the footage taken, nor any other details of the report from an area that Russia said it would annex in 2022.
Ukrainian authorities have not released a statement on the incident.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “dozens of civilians” were in the building at the time of the attack and that Western weapons were used.
The Russian-controlled Luhansk Information Center said Ukraine bombed the bakery using the US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Missile System (HIMARS).
Russian state news agency TASS quoted a Russian official in the operational services as saying the average age of the victims was “35 years, plus or minus five years.”
“There are no children among the victims at the moment, but the removal of the rubble is still ongoing,” the official said.
Previously, Leonid Pasechnik, Moscow’s appointee of the Luhansk region of Ukraine, had said that dozens of people could be under the rubble.