Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – A rocket hit a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians, killing dozens on Friday in land previously held by Russian troops.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said thousands of people were waiting at the station to board the trains when the rocket hit. Photos from the crime scene showed tarp-covered bodies on the ground and the remains of a rocket with the words “For the Children” painted on it in Russian.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied the attack on the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders accused the Russian military of deliberately attacking a place where only civilians were gathered.
“The inhuman Russians don’t change their methods. Without the strength or courage to face us on the battlefield, they cynically destroy civilians,” the president said on social media. “This is an evil without borders. And if it’s not punished, it will never stop.”
Donetsk Regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said 39 people were killed and 87 injured. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children, who heeded calls to leave the area before Russia launches a full-scale offensive.
“People just wanted to leave for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said during a visit to Bucha, a city north of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered numerous bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops left .
Venediktova spoke as workers pulled bodies from a mass grave near a church under the pouring rain. Black body bags were laid out in rows in the mud. None of the dead was Russian, she said. Most of them had been shot. The Attorney General’s Office is investigating the deaths and other mass casualties involving civilians as possible war crimes.
After Russia failed to capture the Ukrainian capital and withdraw from northern Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to Donbass, a predominantly Russian-speaking industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and controlling some areas . The train station is on state-controlled territory.
Ukrainian officials this week warned residents to head to safer parts of the country as soon as possible and said they and Russia had agreed to set up multiple evacuation routes in the east.
One analyst said only Russia has reason to attack civilian rail infrastructure in Donbass and that Ukraine will not intentionally kill its own civilians in a “war of survival.”
“The Ukrainian military is desperate to reinforce units in the area… and the train stations in this area on Ukrainian-occupied territory are critical for the movement of equipment and people,” said Justin Bronk, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Elsewhere in Donbass, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said Russia was concentrating equipment and troops and stepping up shelling and bombing to support their advance.
“We feel the end of preparations for this massive breakthrough, for this great battle that will take place around us in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he said in a televised address.
In his late-night video address, Zelenskyy said that horrors worse than those in Bucha had already surfaced in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital.
“And what will happen when the world learns the full truth about what Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Zelenskyy said late Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the worst suffering during the Russian invasion . “On every street is what the world saw in Bucha and other cities in the Kyiv region … The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”
The Prosecutor General also expressed concern about the death toll in Borodyanka, where the process of recovering bodies from shelled and collapsed buildings has just started. 26 bodies were found in the ruins of just two buildings on Thursday, Venediktova said.
“We don’t know what’s under those houses,” she said, estimating it could take two weeks to find out.
Spurred on by reports that Russian forces have been committing atrocities in areas around the capital, NATO allies agreed to step up their arms supplies after Ukraine’s foreign minister asked for arms from the alliance and other sympathetic countries in an expected offensive in the to oppose the east.
Ukrainian and several Western leaders have blamed Moscow’s troops for the massacres. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German foreign intelligence service intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers talking about the killing of civilians. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
In a rare acknowledgment of the cost of the war to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted to Britain’s Sky News on Thursday that the country has suffered significant military damage, calling it a “tragedy”.
He told reporters on Friday that his reference to troop losses was based on the latest figures from the Russian Defense Ministry, which reported on March 25 that 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine. NATO estimates Russia’s losses many times higher.
In anticipation of increased attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions that were either attacked or occupied.
Marina Morozova and her husband fled Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russians.
“They are waiting for a big fight. We’ve seen shells that didn’t explode. It was horrific,” she said.
Morozova, 69, said only Russian TV and radio were available. The Russians were distributing humanitarian aid, she said, and also filmed the distribution
The United Nations estimates that more than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began and that more than 12 million people are stranded in attack zones.
On Thursday, a day after Russian forces began shelling their village in the southern Mykolayiv region, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove in his small blue Lada with his wife and mother-in-law north to Bashtanka, where they are sheltering at a church searched.
“They started destroying the houses and everything,” he said in Pavlo-Marianovka. “Then the tanks emerged from the forest. We figured there would be shelling again in the morning, so I decided to leave.”
Two senior European Union officials and the Prime Minister of Slovakia traveled to Kyiv on Friday to bolster EU support for Ukraine. Prime Minister Eduard Heger said he, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had tabled trade and humanitarian aid proposals for Zelenskyy and his government.
Heger also announced that his country has donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy mentioned the S-300 by name when he spoke to US lawmakers via video in March, asking for air defense systems that would allow Ukraine to “close the skies” to Russian fighter jets and missiles.
Western nations have tightened sanctions against Russia following reports of atrocities near Kyiv. A day after the United States imposed sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, the European Union and Britain followed suit on Friday.
The US Congress voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and ban imports of its oil, while the EU approved an embargo on coal imports. The UN General Assembly, meanwhile, voted to expel Russia from the world body’s leading human rights body.
US President Joe Biden said the UN vote shows how “Putin’s war has turned Russia into an international pariah”.
“The signs of people being raped, tortured, executed — in some cases with bodies desecrated — are an outrage to our common humanity,” Biden said.
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Anna reported from Bucha, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Chernihiv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine