Russia denies that it carried out the attack, in the face of accusations by the Ukrainian president.
A missile struck a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians on Friday, killing dozens of people, Ukrainian authorities said.
At the same time, they warned that they expected to find more evidence of possible war crimes in parts of the country that were previously in the hands of Russian troops.
Hours following reporting that Ukrainian troops had found brutal scenes in a settlement north of kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there were “thousands” of people at the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region. when the missile fell.
Photos from the scene showed bodies on the ground covered in cloth and the remains of a rocket with the words “For the children” painted on in Russian.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied targeting the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders accused the Russian military of deliberately targeting a place where only civilians were gathering.
“The inhuman Russians do not change their methods. Without the strength or the courage to confront us on the battlefield, they cynically destroy the civilian population,” the president said on social media.
“This is limitless evil. And if it is not punished, it will never stop », he added.
Donetsk Regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said 39 people were killed and 87 wounded in the attack.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said around 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children. The Ukrainian government has been asking people to leave the area in the face of an expected new offensive by Russian forces.
After failing to take the capital, Russia has focused on Donbas, a mostly Russophone industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for years and control some areas.
Ukrainian rulers have predicted there will be more grisly finds in reclaimed cities and towns as Russian soldiers withdraw to mass in eastern Ukraine.
more attacks
In his late-night speech, Zelenskyy predicted that there would be more macabre finds in northern towns from which the Russians retreated to concentrate in the east. The president warned that in the northern city of Borodianka, just 30 kilometers northwest of Bucha, there might be even more deaths, noting that “it is much more horrible there.”
Ukrainian authorities said earlier in the week that 410 dead civilians had been found around kyiv. Volunteers have been collecting bodies for days, and on Thursday they removed more from Bucha.
In the southern port city of Mariupol, authorities expect to find much the same scenario. “The same cruelty, the same terrible crimes,” Zelenskyy said.
Various Ukrainian and Western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow troops. The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency intercepted radio messages between Russian soldiers talking regarding the killing of civilians.
Russia claims without evidence that Bucha’s scenes are staged.
Russia’s six-week invasion has failed to quickly take kyiv and accomplish what Western countries say was President Vladimir Putin’s initial goal: to overthrow the government.
Following that failure and heavy losses, Russia shifted its focus to Donbas, a largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the country’s east where separatist rebels, backed by Moscow, have been fighting state troops for eight years.
Huida
On Thursday, a day following Russian forces began shelling his village in the southern region of Mikolaiv, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, headed north in his little blue Lada accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law. They reached Bashtanka, where they found temporary accommodation in a church.
“They started destroying the houses and everything else” in Pavlo-Marianovka, he said. “So, the tanks appeared from the forest. We thought that in the morning they would bomb once more, so I decided to leave.”
Hundreds of people have fled from villages in the Mikolaiv and Kherson regions that are under attack or occupied by the Russians.
The United Nations estimates that the war has left at least 6.5 million internally displaced. Its refugee agency, UNHCR, said more than four million people have fled the country since the Russian operation began on February 24, in Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
The International Organization for Migration, which tracks not only refugees but all people who are forced to leave their homes, estimates that more than 12 million people are stranded in areas under attack.
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