Ukraine said at least 50 people were killed and another 50 injured in a missile attack on Friday on a train station packed with civilians fleeing a worsening Russian offensive in the east.
Officials said many of the wounded had lost limbs and were being operated on after the attack on the city of Kramatorsk, which Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy called a deliberate attack on civilians using a Tochka U short-range ballistic missile.
“Without the strength and courage to face us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Zelenskiy said in a statement. “This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and British Defense Minister Ben Wallace criticized the attack.
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said there was “growing evidence that Russian forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine,” and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine denounced it as “another atrocity committed by Russia.” in Ukraine”.
Zelenskiy later said in a video speech to the Finnish Parliament that no Ukrainian troops were at the station at the time of the attack.
THE Reuters could not verify what happened at the station.
The Russian Defense Ministry said, according to the news agency RIAthat the missiles that would have hit the station were used only by Ukraine’s military and that the Russian Armed Forces had no designated targets in Kramatorsk on Friday.
The governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Russian forces fired a Tochka missile containing cluster munitions, but did not share what evidence he had of this. THE Reuters failed to immediately verify the claim.
Russia has previously denied using cluster munitions in Ukraine.
Banned by the United Nations (UN) under a 2008 international convention to which Russia is not a party, cluster munitions are composed of a capsule that explodes in midair, dispersing tens or even hundreds of smaller “bombs” over a wide area. .
panic and fear
Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksander Honcharenko said about 4,000 people were at the station at the time of the attack. At least four of the dead were children.
“Some people have lost a leg, others an arm. Now they are receiving medical care. The hospitals are performing about 40 operations simultaneously,” the mayor said in a statement. briefing online.
Governor Kyrylenko published a photograph online showing several bodies on the floor alongside suitcases and other luggage. Armed police officers wearing bulletproof vests stood beside them.
Another photo showed rescue services fighting what appeared to be a fire, with a cloud of gray smoke rising into the air.
“The rashists (‘Russian fascists’) knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible,” the governor wrote in a statement. post online.
THE Reuters could not immediately check the photos.
“They (Russian forces) wanted to hit the station,” said Mayor Honcharenko, a view shared by presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych.
Three trains carrying people on the run were blocked in the same region of Ukraine on Thursday after an airstrike on the railway line, according to the Ukrainian railway chief.
Ukrainian officials say Russian forces are regrouping for a new offensive and that Moscow plans to seize as much territory as possible in the eastern part of Ukraine, known as the Donbass, on the Russian border.
Local authorities in some areas have asked civilians to leave while it is still possible and relatively safe to do so.
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