© KEYSTONE/AP/Andriy Andriyenko
At least 50 people were killed in a missile strike Friday on a train station in Donbass where civilians were thronging to flee eastern Ukraine targeted by Russian forces. Moscow denies any responsibility.
The bloody strike comes as international outrage was already strong following images of atrocities the Russian army has been accused of in localities from which it has withdrawn around the capital kyiv, where senior European officials were expected to show their support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.
Kramatorsk station, “capital” of Donbass under Ukrainian control, was the target of the attack which left 50 dead, including five children, according to the governor of the region. He said 98 injured had been hospitalized. A previous assessment of the security services reported 39 dead.
AFP journalists saw at least thirty bodies in body bags or under tarpaulins in front of the station, used for the evacuation of civilians from the region. The boss of the Ukrainian railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, Oleksandre Kamychine, had mentioned more than 100 wounded, denouncing a “deliberate strike”.
“Boundless Evil”
President Zelensky denounced “unbounded evil” unleashed by Russia and “inhuman” methods. “Without the strength and the courage to face us on the battlefield, they cynically annihilate the civilian population. It is an evil that has no limit. And if it is not punished, it will not never stop,” he wrote on Telegram.
French President Emmanuel Macron for his part castigated an “abominable” action, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaking of an “appalling” attack. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Friday to strengthen British military aid to Ukraine, with the dispatch of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.
The strike was described as a “despicable attack” by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who arrived in Ukraine for a support visit accompanied by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
Both went in the late followingnoon to Boutcha, a small town northwest of kyiv that was bombed and then occupied by Russian soldiers and where dozens of corpses wearing civilian clothes, some with their hands tied behind their backs, were discovered in early April, sparking outrage.
“Ukrainian provocations”
Moscow immediately denied being responsible, claiming not to have the type of missile which would have been used and denouncing a Ukrainian “provocation”. The Russian Ministry of Defense then accused “the kyiv regime” of having “orchestrated” the strike to “prevent the departure of the population of the city in order to be able to use it as a human shield”.
Moscow regularly denounces Ukrainian “provocations” to defend itself from accusations of abuse and war crimes, as recently concerning Boutcha, north-west of kyiv, bombarded then occupied by Russian soldiers and where dozens of corpses dressed in civilian clothes, some with their hands tied behind their backs were discovered in early April.
The Russian Ministry of Defense had indicated earlier Friday that the Russian army had destroyed with high precision missiles “armaments and military equipment in the stations of Pokrovsk, Sloviansk and Barvinkove”, localities all located not far from Kramatorsk.
Resumption of evacuations
After withdrawing its troops from the kyiv region and northern Ukraine, Russia has made the conquest of Donbass, part of which has been controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists, its priority objective. It multiplies its attacks in the south and the east, the Ukrainian authorities striving to evacuate civilians.
Evacuations by train, which had been interrupted due to the destruction of part of the railway, had resumed overnight from Thursday to Friday, according to the governor of the Lugansk region. Serguiï Gaïdaï had been encouraging residents to leave for several days so as not to “condemn themselves to death”.
Aimed Russian Coal
On Friday, the United Kingdom announced that it was sanctioning the two daughters of President Vladimir Putin and that of the head of diplomacy Sergei Lavrov, saying it wanted to attack the “lavish lifestyle of the inner circle of the Kremlin”.
And the European Union also adopted a new set of punitive measures on Thursday evening, including an embargo on Russian coal. This is the very first time that the Europeans have hit the Russian energy sector, on which they are very dependent.
The EU, which said it had already frozen a total of 29.5 billion euros in Russian assets, imports 45% of its coal from Russia, worth four billion euros a year. The embargo will come into force at the beginning of August.
