Children among 50 killed in train station strike as civilians flee east Ukraine
Burnt out vehicles are seen after a rocket attack on the railway station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Friday. AFP
Fifty people were killed, including five children, the regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said as the toll rose on one of the deadliest strikes of the six-week-old war.
President Volodymyr Zelensky reported 300 were injured, saying the strike showed "evil with no limits." Russia's defence ministry said suggestions it had carried out the attack were "absolutely untrue."
The remains of a rocket lie on an area of grass, after a rocket attack on the railway station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. AFPThe governor of Donetsk region says the death toll from a missile strike on a rail station in the eastern town of Kramatorsk has risen to 50, including five children.
Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on social media that 38 people had died at the scene, and another 12 in hospital.
Ukrainian officials have said as many as 4,000 people were at the station, where trains were evacuating civilians westward from the Ukraine-held town ahead of an expected Russian offensive.
AFP journalists 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 where the remains of a large rocket was lying with the words "for our children" in Russian.
"I'm looking for my husband. He was here. I can't reach him," a woman told AFP, sobbing and holding her phone to her ear.
Another woman in a state of shock said: "I was in the station. I heard like a double explosion. I rushed to the wall for protection. "Then I saw people covered in blood entering the station and bodies everywhere on the ground."
Body parts, broken glass and abandoned baggage lay scattered around the station and across the platform.
The bombing came as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell were in Kyiv to show solidarity with Ukraine.
More than a month into President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has shifted its focus to eastern and southern Ukraine after stiff resistance torpedoed plans to swiftly capture the capital Kyiv.
Instead, Russian troops appear set on creating a long-sought land link between occupied Crimea and the Moscow-backed separatist statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas.
Heavy shelling has already begun to lay waste to towns in the region, and officials have begged civilians to flee, while the intensity of fighting is impeding evacuations. But officials continued to press civilians to leave.
"There is no secret — the battle for Donbas will be decisive. What we have already experienced — all this horror — it can multiply," warned Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday.
"Leave! The next few days are the last chances. Buses will be waiting for you in the morning," he added.
'More horrific'
Meanwhile, near the capital Kyiv, residents and Ukrainian officials returning after a Russian withdrawal from the area were trying to piece together the scale of the devastation.
Violence in the town of Bucha, where authorities say hundreds were killed — including some found with their hands bound — has become a byword for allegations of brutality inflicted under Russian occupation. But Zelensky warned worse was being uncovered.
"They have started sorting through the ruins in Borodianka," northwest of Kyiv, he said in his nightly address.
"It's much more horrific there. There are even more victims of Russian occupiers."
Violence in the area has caused massive destruction, levelling and damaging many buildings, and bodies are only now being retrieved.
Agencies
