The initial U.S. estimate is that the rocket that struck the Kramatorsk train station was a short-range ballistic missile fired from a Russian position inside Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said Friday. It is a “complete expectation” by the United States that the attack on the Kramatorsk train station in Ukraine was a Russian strike with an SS-21 short-range ballistic missile, according to another senior US defense official. The official said that while the United States did not have “perfect visibility in the process of targeting Russia”, the railway station is an important railway junction located “right on the edge of the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region.” Earlier on Friday, Ukraine accused Russian forces of using indiscriminate cluster munitions in Friday’s attack that killed at least 50 people. Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk region’s military administration, said a Russian Tochka-U missile loaded with small bombs had hit civilians who had evacuated the area. Russian forces have been accused of regularly using cluster munitions against political targets in Ukraine. Last week, the UN Human Rights Watch’s mission in Ukraine said it had received credible allegations that the Russian armed forces had used cluster munitions at least 24 times. Such attacks “could amount to war crimes,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michel Bachelet at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) also confirmed the use of cluster munitions by Russia, including at least three cases in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv on March 7, 11 and 13, 2022. Cluster munitions pose a distinct threat to civilians by accidentally scattering sub-munitions or bombs over a wide area. Bombs that fail to explode during a collision become de facto landmines, extending the damage after the collision. In 2008, more than 100 countries at the United Nations signed a ban on cluster munitions, according to the UN website. Ukraine and Russia did not sign the agreement.
