Kyiv: As many as 30 people were killed at a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine, an evacuation point for civilians, Ukrainian authorities said Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that thousands of people were at the train station when the missile struck.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied targeting the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy blamed Russia for the bodies lying in what looked like an outdoor waiting area.
“The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” the president said on social media.
“This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop,” the regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, later said that 39 people were killed and 87 wounded.
The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russian forces arrived.
“The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew.
Venediktova spoke as workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under spitting rain. Black body bags were laid out in rows in the mud. None of the dead were Russians; she said. Most of them had been shot. The prosecutor general’s office is investigating the deaths as possible war crimes.
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