Dozens killed in missile strike on Ukraine railway station crowded with evacuees

A missile has hit a railway station in eastern Ukraine where thousands of people were trying to flee, killing 50 people, Ukrainian authorities said.

Photos from the scene in Kramatorsk showed bodies covered with tarpaulins 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, 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.

The Russian Defence Ministry denied attacking the station in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region, but President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders accused Russia’s military of deliberately targeting a location where only civilians were assembled.

“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.”

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, which lies in the Donbas, said 50 people were killed, including five children, and dozens were wounded.

“The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, where journalists and returning Ukrainians have discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew.

She spoke as workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church, with black body bags laid out in rows in the mud.

None of the dead were Russians and most of them had been shot, she said. The prosecutor general’s office is investigating the deaths, and other mass casualties involving civilians, as possible war crimes.

After failing to take Ukraine’s capital and withdrawing from northern Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some areas.

The railway station is in Ukrainian government-controlled territory.

Ukrainian officials had warned residents this week to leave as soon as possible for safer parts of the country and said they and Russia had agreed to establish multiple evacuation routes in the east.

Elsewhere in the Donbas, the governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, said Russia was concentrating equipment and troops and increasing shelling and bombing to aid their advance.

“We sense the end of preparations for that massive breakthrough, for that great battle which will happen here around us, in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he said in a televised address.

In his nightly video address, Mr Zelensky said horrors worse than the ones in Bucha already had surfaced in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital.

“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” he said late on Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering during Russia’s invasion.

“There, on every street, is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns 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 retrieving bodies from shelled and collapsed buildings has just begun.

Twenty-six bodies were found on Thursday from the ruins of two buildings, Ms Venediktova said.

“We don’t know what’s under these houses,” she said, estimating it could take two weeks to find out.

Spurred by reports that Russian forces committed atrocities in areas surrounding the capital, Nato nations agreed to increase their supply of arms after Ukraine’s foreign minister pleaded for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help face down an expected offensive in the east.

Ukrainian and several western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops. Weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported Germany’s foreign intelligence agency intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers discussing killings of civilians.

Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.

In a rare acknowledgment of the war’s cost to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged to Sky News on Thursday that the country has suffered significant military causalities, calling it a “tragedy”.

On Friday he told reporters that his reference to troop losses was based on the most recent Russian Defence Ministry numbers, which reported on March 25 that 1,351 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine. Nato has estimated Russia’s casualties to be several times higher.

The United Nations estimates more than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began and more than 12 million people are stranded in areas under attack.