UKRAINE URGES CIVILIANS TO FLEE
Luhansk governor tells citizens to leave as railway station strike toll rises
UKRAINE yesterday called on civilians in the eastern Luhansk region to flee from Russian shelling after officials said more than 50 civilians trying to evacuate by rail from a neighbouring region were killed in a missile attack.
Air raid sirens rang out across much of the east of Ukraine yesterday, officials said, as Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai urged people in a televised address to leave as Russia was amassing forces for an offensive.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a “firm global response” to Friday’s missile attack on a train station crowded with women, children and the elderly in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region. The city mayor, who estimated 4,000 people were gathered there at the time, said at least 52 died.
Russia’s Defence Ministry denied responsibility for the attack, saying in a statement the missiles that struck the station were used only by Ukraine’s military and that Russia’s armed forces had no targets assigned in Kramatorsk on Friday.
All statements by the Ukrainian authorities on the attack were “provocations”, it said.
Russia’s incursion, which had lasted over six weeks, had forced more than four million people to flee abroad, killed or injured thousands, left a quarter of the population homeless, and turned cities into rubble.
The British Defence Ministry said in a briefing it expected air attacks to increase in the south and east as Russia sought to establish a land bridge between Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, and the Donbas but Ukrainian forces were thwarting the advance.
Ten humanitarian corridors had been agreed for yesterday, including one for people evacuating by private transport from the devastated southeastern port city of Mariupol, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksander Honcharenko said he expected just 50,000 to 60,000 of his city’s’ 220,000 population to remain within a week or two.
Friday’s attack added to a wave of international revulsion at the high level of civilian casualties following the discovery of hundreds of dead bodies in the town of Bucha near Kyiv after Russian soldiers withdrew.
The European Union and Britain joined in condemnation of the incident which took place on the same day European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Kyiv to show solidarity and accelerate Ukraine’s membership process.
Visiting the town on Friday as a forensics team began exhuming a mass grave in Bucha, von der Leyen said it had witnessed the “unthinkable”.
She later handed Zelenskyy a questionnaire forming a starting point for the EU to decide on membership.