More civilians flee east Ukraine after deadly station strike
KYIV, Ukraine — Civilian evacuations moved forward in patches of battle-scarred eastern Ukraine on Saturday, a day after a missile strike killed at least 52 people and wounded more than 100 at a train station where thousands clamored to leave before an expected Russian onslaught.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demanded a tough global response to Friday's train station attack in Kramatorsk, calling it the latest example of war crimes by Russian forces that should motivate the West to do more to help his country defend itself.
“All world efforts will be directed to establish every minute of who did what, who gave what orders, where the missile came from, who transported it, who gave the command and how this strike was agreed,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, his voice rising in anger.
Russia denied it was responsible and accused Ukraine’s military of firing on the station to try to turn blame for civilian casualties on Moscow. A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman detailed the missile’s trajectory and Ukrainian troop positions to bolster the argument.
Western experts and Ukrainian authorities insisted that Russia launched the weapon. Remnants of the rocket had the words “For the children” in Russian painted on it. The phrasing seemed to suggest the missile was sent to avenge the loss or subjugation of children, although its exact meaning remained unclear.
Panicked Residents
With trains not running out of Kramatorsk on Saturday, panicked residents boarded buses or looked for other ways to get out, fearing the kind of unrelenting assaults and occupations by Russian invaders that delivered food shortages, demolished buildings and death to other cities elsewhere in Ukraine.
“It was terrifying. The horror, the horror," one resident told British broadcaster Sky, recalling the train station . "Heaven forbid, to live through this again. No, I don’t want to.”
Ukraine’s state railway company said in a statement Saturday that residents of Kramatorsk and other parts of the country’s contested Donbas region could flee through other train stations. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 10 evacuation corridors were planned for Saturday.
Russia has pulled its troops from northern Ukraine and put its focus on the Donbas after failing to capture the capital, Kyiv. Western military analysts said a long arc of territory was under Russian control, from Kharkiv — Ukraine's second-largest city — in the north to Kherson in the south. But Ukranian fighters continued to repel attacks and hold ground, according to the Western assessments.
The train station attack came as Ukrainian authorities worked to identify victims and document possible war crimes by Russian soldiers in northern Ukraine. The mayor of Bucha, a town near Kyiv where graphic evidence of civilian slayings emerged after the Russians withdrew, said search teams were still finding the bodies of people shot at close range in yards, parks and city squares.
On Friday, workers unearthed the bodies of 67 people from a mass grave near a church, according to Ukraine's prosecutor general. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing atrocities in the war that began with Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. A total of 176 children have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the war, while 324 more have been wounded, the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office said Saturday.
Ukrainian authorities have warned they expect to find more mass killings once they reach the southern port city of Mariupol, which is also in the Donbas and has been subjected to a monthlong blockade and intense fighting.
As journalists who had been largely absent from the city began to trickle back in, new images emerged of the devastation from an airstrike on a theater last month that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians seeking shelter.
Military analysts had predicted for weeks that Russia would succeed in taking Mariupol but said Ukrainian defenders were still putting up a fight. The city's location on the Sea of Azov is critical to establishing a land bridge from the Crimean Peninula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago.
Grisly evidence
Some of the grisliest evidence of atrocities so far has been found in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv, from which Russian troops pulled back in recent days. An international organization formed to identify the dead and missing from the 1990s Balkans conflicts is sending a team of forensics experts to Ukraine to help put names to bodies.