Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused Russia on Wednesday of “violating” the laws of war after an explosion at a restaurant in eastern Ukraine killed 10 people and injured 61, including prominent Colombian writer Hector Abad, AFP and Agerpres said.

“Russia attacked three defenseless Colombians. With this, she violated the protocols of war,” the left-wing president condemned on Twitter.

Gustavo Petro ordered his government to send a “diplomatic note of protest” to Russia after Tuesday night’s blast and expressed hope that the three Colombians who suffered minor injuries in the attack would return home “alive and unharmed.”

For its part, Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs “strongly condemned this unacceptable attack on a civilian target.”

In a statement, he expressed his “solidarity” with all the victims of the strike, especially with the Colombians present at the scene: the writer Hector Abad, the author of the novel We Already Forget Who We Will Be, Sergio Jaramillo. , a Colombian politician who was one of the main negotiators of the peace agreement signed in 2016 with the Marxist FARC guerrillas, and journalist Catalina Gómez, a correspondent in Ukraine for several Spanish-language media outlets, including France 24 in Spanish.

Photos shared on social media show Abad and Jaramillo in the hospital, their clothes covered in blood.

Colombia for the first time condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine

This is the first time that President Petro publicly and in such clear terms criticizes the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like most left-wing governments in Latin America, Petro has so far spoken out in favor of a “peaceful solution” in Ukraine and against supplying arms to Kyiv, an admonition that contrasts with other firm international commitments to “progress” and “change.”

The Kramatorsk strike destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the city center, popular with journalists, humanitarian workers and the military.

As a result of the explosion, at least 10 people died, and about 60 others were injured, local authorities reported. According to the governor of the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenka, during the attack, “mostly civilians were present” in the restaurant.

Kramatorsk, a major railway hub, is home to military installations and is the de facto regional capital after the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk were seized by Moscow-backed pro-Russian separatists in 2014.

The city was repeatedly subjected to Russian bombings. The largest was the one at the train station in April 2022, which killed 61 people and injured more than 160 of the approximately 4,000 civilians waiting for a train to leave the city.