RUSSIAN MISSILE STRIKES PACKED UKRAINIAN TRAIN STATION, KILLING DOZENS

Fri 08 April 2022:

A long-range Russian missile slammed into a a railway station in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, jammed with civilian refugees and railroad staff, killing at least 30 and injuring more than 100, news reports said on Friday.

AFP journalists on the scene saw the bodies of at least 30 people grouped and lying under plastic sheets next to the station, before being loaded onto a military truck.

Blood was pooling on the ground and packed bags were strewn outside the building in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The remains of a large rocket with the words “for our children” in Russian was lying just adjacent to the main building.

BREAKING:

30 refugees, many of them children, were killed in rocket attack on the Kramatorsk railway station while trying to flee west.

Yesterday, Russia struck the tracks, making it impossible to leave. It was repaired & ppl tried to leave today insteadpic.twitter.com/36RsWfOqhK

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) April 8, 2022

Gruesome images from the scene made public by the UNIAN news agency and other independent news media showed at least eight travelers cut down by fragments, and suitcases, baby strollers and bags and suitcases spotted with blood and cut by flying metal.

Images showed the debris of a heavy RF missile, a weapon normally used to target airfields or troop concentrations, embedded in grass in front of the rail station. Isolated early reports identified the weapon as Iksander missile, one of the Russia’s most modern weapons.

Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said thousands of people were at the train station at the time of the strike, preparing to head to safer regions.

The head of Ukraine’s railway company, Alexander Kamyshin, said that two rockets hit the station.

“This is a deliberate attack on the passenger infrastructure of the railway and the residents of Kramatorsk,” Kamyshin said.

The missile hit in the mid-morning hours as Kramatorsk region residents, mostly women and children, were waiting for trains to take them out of the region to safety.

Ukrainian Presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said there are no military facilities near Kramatorsk rail station, and that the missile strike had been preceded by drone reconnaissance. The attack was premeditated and intended to inflict maximum civilian casualties, he claimed.

Two Russian rockets hit a railway station in Kramatorsk, killing more than 30 people, according to Ukrainian officials.

Sky’s @sparkomat has the latest.

Read more: https://t.co/luSYUhF7Al pic.twitter.com/VquRWZI0D1

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 8, 2022

A key road and rail junction in Ukraine’s Donbas region, Kramatorsk is a likely objective for a major Russian Federation (RF) army offensive planned in the region in coming days or weeks,

Zelensky says Russia displays ‘evil with no limits’ in railway attack

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described a Russian rocket attack on a train station in eastern Ukraine, which killed at least 35 people, as “evil with no limits”.

“They are cynically destroying the civilian population. This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop,” Zelensky said in a statement on social media after the strikes on a hub that has been used by many civilians in recent days to flee an anticipated Russian advance.

Moscow accuses Ukraine of staging Kramatorsk attack

Russia accused Kyiv of carrying out a deadly attack on a railway station in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine that claimed dozens of lives.

“The purpose of the Kyiv regime’s attack on the railway station in Kramatorsk was to disrupt the mass exit of residents from the city in order to use them as a ‘human shield’ to defend the positions of Ukraine’s armed forces,” the defence ministry said in a statement.

The ministry claimed that the attack was carried out by Ukraine’s forces from the town of Dobropillya, some 45 kilometres (27 miles) southwest of Kramatorsk.

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