By: Isabella Arbizo
Staff Writer
At least 50 people, including five children, were killed after Russian forces carried out a missile strike on a railway station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, that was being used by civilians trying to flee the fighting, Ukrainian officials said Friday. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional military administration in Donetsk, where the attack took place, said that 98 wounded people — 16 children, 46 women, and 36 men — were taken to local hospitals.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier that nearly 300 people were wounded in the strike. In an address to Finland’s parliament on Friday, Zelensky said that the “Russian military hit the railway terminal,” adding: “There are witnesses, there are videos, there are remnants of the missiles and dead people.” He said that “people (were) crowded waiting for the trains to be evacuated to the safe territory” at the station. “Why do they need to hit civilians with missiles? Why this cruelty that the world has witnessed in Bucha and other cities liberated by the Ukrainian army?” Zelensky asked lawmakers. Local police said in a statement that the rockets struck a temporary waiting room, where “hundreds of people were waiting for the evacuation train.” “This is another proof that Russia is brutally, barbarically killing the civilian Ukrainians, with one goal only — to kill,” the mayor of Kramatorsk said in a statement.
The mayor said that some 8,000 people per day were going to the station to evacuate during the last two weeks. As many as 4,000 people were there when the missile struck. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the attack a “deliberate slaughter.” “Russians knew that the train station in Kramatorsk was full of civilians waiting to be evacuated,” he said. The Russian Ministry of Defense issued a statement Friday calling the missile strike a “provocation,” in a statement that mirrored recent denials of the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “All the statements of representatives of the Kyiv nationalist regime about the alleged ‘missile attack’ by Russia on April 8 at the railway station in Kramatorsk are a provocation and absolutely do not correspond to reality,” the statement said.