Chris Lange, FISM News

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Bodies, baby carriages, stuffed animals, and abandoned luggage lay strewn across an evacuation hub in eastern Ukraine early Friday following a missile strike on a train station in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region. Authorities said at least 50 people were killed and at least 300 were wounded, many whose limbs were torn off in the blast.

The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general reported that around 4,000 evacuees – mostly women, children, and the elderly – were packed in and around the station waiting for trains to take them to safety at the time of the attack. Authorities had been urging residents to flee the region before Russian forces arrived.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted graphic images of the aftermath of the deadly attack in a tweet, accusing Russian “war criminals” of purposely targeting civilians and using “cluster munitions.” The photos showed lifeless bodies scattered across a blood-soaked, bricked waiting area next to a train with its windows blown out. 

“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,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a social media post that also included images of the scene. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”

Zelenskyy said the strike was carried out with a Tochka U short-range ballistic missile. 

Moscow’s state media reported that Russia’s defense ministry claims the missile was launched by Ukraine’s military and denied having any targets assigned in Kramatorsk on Friday.

The attack came less than a week after the discovery of over 400 bodies in Bucha, near the capital city of Kyiv, from whence Russian forces had withdrawn over the weekend. The corpses bore evidence of torture and summary executions, some of them burned. Many bodies were found with their hands bound and close-range gunshot wounds to the head. Officials also discovered mass graves where bodies had been dumped. Disturbing reports of women being raped and murdered in front of their children and other shocking atrocities have since emerged. 

Just hours before the train station attack, President Zelenskyy said even worse scenes of brutality were discovered in Borodianka, a settlement north of Kyiv. The Ukrainian leader grimly predicted that more horrific discoveries would be made in northern cities and towns previously occupied by Russian forces preceding redeployments to the east.

“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Zelenskyy asked in his nightly video address Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering since Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24. 

“There on every street is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region after the departure of the Russian troops. The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”

The Kremlin regime is currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, though Moscow continues to deny targeting civilians. 

Germany’s Der Spiegel reported this week that German foreign intelligence agents intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers during which they discussed the killings of civilians. The report indicates that intercepted communications correspond with locations of bodies discovered on Bucha’s main road. 

“In one of them, a soldier apparently told another that they had just shot a person on a bicycle. That corresponds to the photo of the dead body lying next to a bicycle that has been shared around the world,” the report said.