Missile kills at least 52 at crowded Ukrainian train station
KYIV, Ukraine – A missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine where thousands had gathered Friday, killing at least 52 and wounding dozens more in an attack on a crowd of mostly women and children trying to flee a new, looming Russian offensive, Ukrainian authorities said.
The attack that some denounced as yet another war crime in the 6-week-old conflict came as workers unearthed bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, a town near Ukraine’s capital where dozens of killings have been documented after a Russian pullout.
Photos from the station in Kramatorsk showed the dead covered with tarps, and the remnants of a rocket with the words “For the children” painted on it in Russian. About 4,000 civilians had been in and around the station, heeding calls to leave before fighting intensifies in the Donbas region, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who says he expects a tough global response, and other leaders accused Russia’s military of deliberately attacking the station. Russia, in turn, blamed Ukraine, saying it doesn’t use the kind of missile that hit the station – a contention experts dismissed.
Zelenskyy told Ukrainians in his nightly video address Friday that great efforts would be taken “to establish every minute of who did what, who gave what orders, where the missile came from, who transported it, who gave the command and how this strike was agreed to.”
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, in the Donbas, said 52 people were killed, including five children, and many dozens more were wounded.
“There are many people in a serious condition, without arms or legs,” Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko said. Even with 30 to 40 surgeons working, the local hospital was struggling, he said.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace denounced the attack as a war crime, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “completely unacceptable.”
“There are almost no words for it,” European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. “The cynical behavior (by Russia) has almost no benchmark anymore.”
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of atrocities in the war that began with the Feb. 24 invasion. More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more have been displaced. Some of the most startling evidence of atrocities has been found in towns around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, from which Russian troops pulled back in recent days.
In Bucha, Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk has said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians and were still finding bodies in yards, parks and city squares – 90% of whom were shot.
Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
On Friday, workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a town church under spitting rain, lining up black body bags in rows in the mud.
About 67 people were buried in the grave, according to a statement from Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova’s office, which is investigating those deaths and other mass casualties involving civilians as possible war crimes.
“Like the massacres in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes, the missile attack on Kramatorsk should be one of the charges at the tribunal that must be held,” Zelenskyy said, his voice rising in anger late Friday.
The killings around Kyiv were revealed when Russian forces pulled back after failing to take the capital in the face of stiff resistance. Russian troops have now set their sights on the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some areas.