KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s top security body decided on Friday to bring officials to justice over the deaths of three people who were locked out of a bomb shelter during a Russian missile strike, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday.
Zelenskiy said the National Security and Defence Council had met and discussed the security of the Ukrainian people, judicial reforms and Ukraine’s accession to the European Union.
“A quarter of bomb shelters in Ukraine and a third in Kyiv are unfit for use,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app, citing an audit of air raid shelters that he ordered following the three deaths on June 1.
“The decision of the National Security Council is to bring the guilty to justice, and to get all protective structures in the proper condition.”
He provided no other details of the decision or who might be punished, but posted a video of top government and military officials raising their hands in a vote at a round table.
Oleksiy Danylov, the council’s secretary, said earlier this week that “staff decisions” could be made during the meeting.
The deaths of the three people, after they rushed to a Kyiv air raid shelter that failed to open, caused public outrage.
Zelenskiy criticised Kyiv city officials, and prosecutors put the head of Kyiv’s municipal department for security under house arrest following an audit of air raid shelters.
After the bomb shelter incident, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said he bore some responsibility but that others were to blame, especially appointees of the president.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
