Ukraine said as many as 50 people, including five children, were killed and many more were wounded and lost limbs in a rocket strike at a railway station packed with civilians fleeing the threat of a major Russian offensive in the country’s east.
As regional authorities scrambled to rush civilians out of harm’s way, a group of EU leaders, meanwhile, visited Kyiv to offer President Volodymyr Zelensky support and assure him there will be a path to EU membership for Ukraine.
Zelensky called the strike on the station in Kramatorsk in the eastern region of Donetsk region a deliberate attack on civilians.
Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said the death toll rose to 50 from an earlier reported 39 as some of the several dozen wounded had died after being taken to hospital or medical centres.
He said the station was hit by a Tochka U short-range ballistic missile that contained cluster munitions, which explode in mid-air, spraying small lethal bomblets over a wider area.
“They wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible,” he said.
Reuters was unable to verify what happened in Kramatorsk.
The use of cluster munitions is banned under a 2008 convention. Russia has not signed the convention but has previously denied using such munitions in Ukraine.
The Russian defence ministry was quoted by RIA news agency as saying 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 on Friday.
Zelensky said no Ukrainian troops were at the station. “Russian forces (fired) on an ordinary train station, on ordinary people, there were no soldiers there,” he told Finland’s parliament in a video address.
Kramatorsk mayor Oleksander Honcharenko estimated that about 4,000 people were at the station at the time of the attack.
“Some people have lost a leg, others an arm. They are now receiving medical assistance. The hospitals are carrying out about 40 operations simultaneously,” the mayor said in an online briefing.
Kyiv has called on its allies for deliveries of more, heavier weapons needed to respond and on Thursday secured a new commitment from the Nato alliance to supply a wide range of weapons.
Ukraine’s military general staff said on Friday that Russian troops were focused on capturing the besieged southeastern port of Mariupol, fighting near the eastern city of Izyum and breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces near Donetsk.
Residents of areas north of Kyiv recaptured from Russian forces were still coming to terms with the month-long occupation.
Trapped for weeks
In Yahidne, a village north of the capital, residents recounted how more than 300 people were trapped for weeks by Russian occupiers in a school basement, with names of those who did not survive the harsh conditions or were killed by soldiers scrawled on the wall.
Reuters was not able to verify independently the villagers’ accounts. Reporters saw one freshly dug grave in a field by the village and two bodies wrapped in white plastic sheets.
After civilian deaths in the town of Bucha were widely condemned by western nations as war crimes, Zelensky said the situation in Borodyanka was “significantly more dreadful”. He offered no further detail or evidence that Russia was responsible for civilian deaths.