Russia hit the mall twice. The second drone was for the rescuers.

A shopping mall in Kryvyi Rih took two drone hits on Friday, in daylight, with people inside. That is the local officials’ account, not a slogan. The city is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown. The dead are still being counted. Anyone selling you a finished toll before the rubble is cleared is writing ahead of the graves.

Oleksandr Hanzha, who runs the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration, said Friday evening the attack killed at least 15 people and injured 130, 23 of them children. AP and CBS carried that briefing. Reuters, citing Hanzha early Saturday, put the dead at 16 and said nine people were still listed as missing, including two children, while crews worked the wreckage. This desk is printing both updates rather than rounding them into one fake number.

Zelenskyy said the second drone arrived about 30 minutes after the first, when rescue workers were already on the site. He called that “absolutely cynical and despicable.” Oleksandr Vilkul, who heads the Kryvyi Rih defense council, said the target was the city’s largest mall, Soniachna Halereia, and that the second hit was a jet-powered Shahed. Those are Ukrainian officials talking. This desk has not seen a specific Russian Defense Ministry claim for this mall, so it is not inventing one.

AP said two other Russian strikes Friday, in the Mykolaiv and Kharkiv regions, brought the country’s total dead that day to 21. Kyiv had already named Friday a day of mourning after Thursday’s ballistic-missile attack on the capital. The overnight follow-up on Saturday, per Kyiv’s military administration via RBC-Ukraine, was a warehouse fire in the Darnytskyi district with one dead. Separate strike. Do not mash them together.

A double-tap on a mall is a method, not a metaphor. If the second airframe was aimed at firefighters, that is a war crime question for investigators, not a caption. If it was a second pass on the same building, that is still a civilian site in daylight. Either way, the people in the food court were not a brigade. Do not let either capital turn them into a talking point before the missing are named.