At least 15 people were killed when Russian drones struck a shopping centre in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Friday afternoon, according to Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city's defence council. Regional authorities put the number of wounded at more than 130. The centre was open and busy when the drones arrived.

The attack arrived in two waves. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a second drone hit the centre about half an hour after the first, by which time emergency crews were already working in the wreckage. He called the strikes "cynical and despicable" and "nothing less than terrorist acts", and said Russia should "face real accountability".

A follow-up strike timed to land after responders reach a site is known as a double tap. It puts ambulance and fire crews inside the blast radius of the second weapon.

Oleksandr Hanzha, the regional governor, said 22 children were among the wounded and that 29 people were in a serious condition, five of them children. In an update early on Saturday he said nine people were preliminarily listed as missing, two of them children, and that crews were still clearing rubble.

The toll moved through Friday night and into Saturday as bodies were recovered, and it remains provisional. Ukrainian officials later put the number of dead at 16. Counts issued while a search is still running are not final, and the figures above are those given by named officials at the times stated.

Kryvyi Rih is an industrial city in the Dnipropetrovsk region, about 60 kilometres from the front line. It is Zelenskyy's home town and has been struck repeatedly through the war.

Ivan Vyhivskyi, the interior minister, said four people were killed in a separate strike in the Mykolaiv region, three of them children.

Russia's defence ministry had not commented on the Kryvyi Rih strike by Saturday afternoon in Australia.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine would respond, without saying how.

Rescue work at the site was continuing on Saturday. The regional administration said it would publish an updated casualty figure once the search was complete.