50 die in Ukraine train station attack

Ukrainian police inspect the remains of a large rocket with the words ‘for our children’ in Russian, next to the main building of a train station in Kramatorsk that was hit in a rocket attack, killing at least 50 people.

A rocket attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed dozens yesterday, as civilians raced to flee the Donbas region bracing for a feared Russian offensive. World leaders condemned the attack with US President Joe Biden accusing Russia of being behind an “horrific atrocity” while the French government called it a “crime against humanity” and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described it as “unconscionable”. Fifty people were killed, including five children, the regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said as the toll rose on one of the deadliest strikes of the six-week-old war. President Volodymyr Zelensky reported 300 were injured, saying the strike showed “evil with no limits”. The United States believes Russia used a short range ballistic missile to strike the railway station, a senior US defence official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Pentagon believes Russian forces used an SS-21 Scarab missile in the strike, but that the motivation for the attack was not yet clear. The SS-21 is the name used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) military alliance for a type of missile known as the Tochka in former Soviet states. The United States was still analysing the strike and it was unclear whether cluster munitions were used, the US official said. “We are not buying the denial by the Russians that they weren’t responsible,” the official said. The Russian defence ministry was quoted by RIA news agency as saying that the missiles said to have struck the station were used only by Ukraine’s military and that Russia’s armed forces had no targets assigned in Kramatorsk yesterday. Videos posted on social media in recent weeks, which Reuters could not independently verify, appear to show Russian forces in or near Ukraine transporting Tochka missile launchers. Odessa, fearing an attack on the Black Sea port city, meanwhile imposed a weekend curfew “given events in Kramatorsk” and the “threat of a missile strike”. AFP journalists at the scene of yesterday’s strike saw the bodies of at least 30 people under plastic sheets next to the station. There were pools of blood on the ground and packed bags were strewn outside the building where the remains of a large rocket was lying with the words “for our children” in Russian. “I’m looking for my husband. He was here. I can’t reach him,” a woman told AFP, sobbing and holding her phone to her ear. Another woman in a state of shock said: “I saw people covered in blood entering the station and bodies everywhere on the ground.” Body parts, broken glass and abandoned baggage lay scattered around the station and across the platform. Russia’s defence ministry said that suggestions it had carried out the attack were “absolutely untrue”. The bombing came as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell were in Kyiv to show solidarity with Ukraine. Russia faces “decay” because of ever more stringent sanctions and Ukraine had a “European future”, she said at a news conference with Zelensky. More than a month into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has shifted its focus to eastern and southern Ukraine after stiff resistance torpedoed plans to swiftly capture the capital Kyiv. Instead, Russian troops appear set on creating a long-sought land link between occupied Crimea and the Moscow-backed separatist statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas. Heavy shelling has already begun to lay waste to towns in the region, and officials have begged civilians to flee, while the intensity of fighting is impeding evacuations. However, officials continued to press civilians to leave. “There is no secret – the battle for Donbas will be decisive. What we have already experienced – all this horror – it can multiply,” warned Luhansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday. “Leave! The next few days are the last chances. Buses will be waiting for you in the morning,” he added. Near the capital Kyiv, residents and Ukrainian officials returning after a Russian withdrawal from the area were trying to piece together the scale of the devastation. Violence in the town of Bucha, where authorities say hundreds were killed – including some found with their hands bound – has become a byword for allegations of brutality inflicted under Russian occupation. However, Zelensky warned worse was being uncovered. “They have started sorting through the ruins in Borodianka,” northwest of Kyiv, he said in his nightly address. “It’s much more horrific there. There are even more victims of Russian occupiers.” Violence in the area has caused massive destruction, levelling and damaging many buildings, and bodies are only now being retrieved. Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova said on Thursday that 26 bodies had been recovered from two destroyed apartment buildings so far. “Only the civilian population was targeted. There is no military site here,” she said, describing evidence of war crimes “at every turn”. Fresh allegations emerged from other areas too, with villagers in Obukhovychi, northwest of Kyiv, telling AFP that they were used as human shields. Moscow has denied targeting civilians.