Ukraine’s president blamed Russia for the latest atrocity in the six-week-old war, calling the Russian invasion force “an evil that has no limits.” Moscow denied responsibility.
One moment, they were packed onto the platforms at the Kramatorsk train station, hundreds of women, children and old people, heeding the pleas of Ukrainian officials imploring them to flee ahead of a feared Russian onslaught. The next moment, death rained from the air. At least 50 people were killed and many more wounded in a missile assault on Friday morning that left bodies and luggage scattered on the ground and turned the Kramatorsk station into the site of another atrocity in the six-week-old war. “There are just children!” one woman cried in a video from the aftermath. The missile struck as officials in Kramatorsk and other cities in eastern Ukraine had been warning civilians to leave before Russian forces mount what is expected to be a major push into the region, where their troops have been regrouping after withdrawing from areas around Kyiv, the capital. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia had hit the station with what he identified as a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile as “thousands of peaceful Ukrainians were waiting to be evacuated.” “Lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Mr. Zelensky said. “This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop.” Russian officials, denying responsibility, said a Ukrainian battalion had fired the missile in what they called a “provocation.” The Russian Defense Ministry said that Tochka-U missiles are only used by the Ukrainian armed forces and that Russian troops had not made any strikes against Kramatorsk on Friday. A senior Pentagon official said the United States believed Russian forces had fired the missile. “They originally claimed a successful strike and then only retracted it when there were reports of civilian casualties,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential intelligence assessment. The train station was hit as a top European Union delegation was visiting Mr. Zelensky’s government, and the images of yet another mass killing provoked new Western outrage. Whether one or more missiles struck the station was not immediately clear, and there was no way to independently verify the origin of the attack. Several parked cars were also hit, catching fire and turning into charred hulks. The waiting area was strewn with bodies and belongings. After the strike, the Ukrainian police inspected the remains of a large rocket next to the train station with the words “for our children” written on it in Russian. It was unclear who had written the message and where the rocket had come from. The mayor of Kramatorsk, Oleksandr Honcharenko, said 4,000 people had been at the station when it was attacked, the vast majority of them women, children and elderly people.
