Ukraine demands strong response after 52 killed at missile station
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wants a tough global response for Russia after Russia fired a missile at a crowded railway station, killing at least 52 people.
Zelensky’s voice rose with anger during his address late Friday, when he said the strike at the Kramatorsk train station, where 4,000 people were trying to flee a looming Russian offensive in the east, was another war crime.
Russia denied being responsible for the attack. Children were also among the dead and dozens were seriously injured.
Photos taken after the attack showed corpses covered with tarpaulin, and the remains of rockets painted with the words “for children” in Russian. Russian phrases seem to suggest that the missile was sent to avenge the loss or subjugation of children, although its exact meaning remained unclear.
The strike shocked the world leaders.
“There are almost no words for it,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters during a visit to Ukraine. “Cynical behavior (by Russia) is now almost no benchmark.”
The attack came as activists elsewhere in the country pulled bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, a town near Kyiv, where graphic evidence of dozens of murders emerged after the withdrawal of Russian forces.
“Like the massacres in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes, the missile attack on Kramatorsk should be one of the charges in the tribunal,” Zelensky said.
He added that “every minute efforts will be made to establish who did what, who gave what orders, where the missile came from, who carried it, who gave the command and how the attack was agreed to.”
After failing to face stiff resistance to Kyiv, the Russian military has now focused its attention on the eastern Donbass region, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrialized region where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and some control the locations. ,
Although the train station is in Ukrainian government-controlled territory in the Donbass, Russia accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack. So do the Moscow-backed separatists of the region, who work closely with Russian troops.
However, Western experts rejected Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s claim that the Russian military “does not use” that type of missile. A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Russia’s military used the missile – and given the location and impact of the strike, it was likely Russia.
Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said only Russia would have reason to target railway infrastructure in the Donbass, as it is vital to the Ukrainian military’s efforts to reinforce its units.
Bronk pointed to other occasions when Russian officials tried to deflect blame by claiming that their military no longer used an outdated weapon “to muddy the waters and try and create suspicion.” He suggested that Russia specifically chose the missile type because Ukraine also has them.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the attack a war crime and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “completely unacceptable”.
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly accused the Russian military of atrocities in the war that began with the February 24 offensive. More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more have been displaced. Some of the most gruesome evidence has been found in towns around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, from where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops pulled back in recent days.
In Buka, Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk has said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians and were still finding bodies in yards, parks and city squares – 90% of whom had been shot.
Russia falsely claimed that the scenes were staged in Buka.
On Friday, activists pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under a rain of spit, laying bags of black bodies in rows in the mud. According to a statement from the office of Prosecutor-General Irina Venediktova, about 67 people were buried there.
Zelensky cited intercepted communications by the Ukrainian Security Service as evidence of Russian war crimes in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Friday.
“There (Russian) soldiers are talking to their parents about what they stole and who they abducted. There are recordings of (Russian) prisoners of war who have admitted to killing people,” he said. “There are pilots in the prison who had maps with civilian targets for making bombs. The remains of the dead are also being investigated.”
Zelensky’s remarks echoed a report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel that said Germany’s foreign intelligence had intercepted Russian military radio traffic in which soldiers may have discussed civilian killings in Buka. The weekly also reported that recordings indicated that the Wagner group of Russian mercenaries was involved in the atrocities there.
German government officials would not confirm or deny the report, but two former German ministers filed a war crimes complaint on Thursday. Russia has denied that its military was involved in war crimes.
Elsewhere, in anticipation of intensified attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled the villages that were either under fire or occupied in the southern regions of Mykolaiv and Kherson.
Ukrainian officials almost daily request Western powers to send more weapons and punish Russia with sanctions, ousting Russian banks from the global financial system, and a total EU embargo on Russian gas and oil.
NATO nations agreed on Thursday to increase supplies of weapons, and Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Hager announced on a visit to Ukraine on Friday that his country had donated a Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine. Zelensky had appealed for S-300s to help the country “close the skies” for Russia’s warplanes and missiles.
A senior US defense official said Friday that the Pentagon believes some of Russia’s retreating units were so badly damaged that they were “for all intents and purposes exhausted.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal military assessments.
The official said the US believes Russia has lost between 15% and 20% of its total combat power since the war began. With some combat units heading back to Russia to re-supply, Moscow has added thousands of troops around Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, he said.
In Kharkiv, Lidia Meziritska stands in the rubble of her home after overnight missile attacks, turning it into rubble.
“Russian world,” he says, “he said, mocking Putin’s nationalist justification for invading Ukraine. “People, children, old people, women are dying. I don’t have a machine gun. I’ll definitely go (fight), regardless of age.”
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Anna reported from Buka, Ukraine. Robert Burns in Washington, Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka in London, and Associated Press reporters from around the world contributed to this report.
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Ukraine demands a strong response after 52 missiles hit the station, the post first appeared on The Associated Press.
