KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A missile hit a train station where thousands of people had gathered to flee in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 50 on Friday, Ukrainian authorities said, as workers unearthed bodies from a mass grave in a town that has become the center of war crimes allegations against Russian troops.
Photos from the station in Kramatorsk showed the dead covered with tarps on the ground and the remnants of a rocket with the words “For the children” painted on it in Russian. About 4,000 civilians were in and around the station at the time of the strike, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said, adding that most were women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russia launches a full-scale offensive in the country’s east.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other leaders accused Russia’s military of deliberately attacking the station in a city in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region. Russia, in turn, blamed Ukraine, saying its forces don’t use the kind of missile that hit the station — a contention military experts dismissed.
“Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, (Russian troops) are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Zelenskyy said on social media. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, which lies in the Donbas, said that 50 people were killed, including five children, and many dozens more were wounded.
Even with 30 to 40 surgeons working to treat the wounded, the local hospital was struggling to cope, Mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko said.
“There are many people in a serious condition, without arms or legs,” he said.
Britain’s Defense Minister Ben Wallace denounced the attack as a war crime and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it “atrocious.”
“There are almost no words for it,” said von der Leyen, who is on a visit to Ukraine. “The cynical behavior (by Russia) has almost no benchmark anymore.”
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of war crimes in the six-week war that has also forced more than 4 million of Ukrainians to flee the country. Some of the most horrific evidence of atrocities has come from towns around Ukraine’s capital that President Vladimir Putin’s troops pulled back from in recent days.
In one of those towns, Bucha, journalists and returning Ukrainians have found scores of bodies lying in the streets, some with their hands bound and others burned.
On Friday, workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church in the town under spitting rain, lining up black body bags in rows in the mud. The office of Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova, who was visiting the town, said about 67 people were buried in the grave.
Many have bullet wounds, she said.
“What does this mean? This means that they killed civilians, shot them,” said Venediktova, whose office is investigating the deaths, and other mass casualties involving civilians, as possible war crimes.
The town’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians and were still finding bodies in yards, parks and city squares.
