Photos from the scene showed corpses covered with tarpaulins on the ground and the remains of a rocket with the phrase “For children” in Russian. About 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, Ukraine’s attorney general’s office said, adding that most were women and children who heard calls to leave the area before Russia launched a full-scale offensive in the east of the country. The Russian Defense Ministry denied that it attacked the station in Kramatorsk, a town in Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders accused the Russian military of deliberately targeting a civilian-only location. “The inhuman Russians do not change their methods. “Without the strength or courage to stand us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” the president said on social media. “This is an evil without limits. “And if he is not punished, then he will never stop.” British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace denounced the attack, saying “striking civilians and critical infrastructure is a war crime”. “These were precision-guided missiles aimed at people trying to find humanitarian shelter,” Wallace said. Pavlo Kyrylenko, Donetsk regional governor in Donbas, said 50 people had been killed, including five children, and dozens more injured. “People just wanted to leave for evacuation,” said Attorney General Iryna Venediktova, visiting Bucha, a city north of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, where returning journalists and Ukrainians found dozens of corpses on the streets and in mass graves after the evacuation. of Russian troops. Venediktova spoke as workers exhumed bodies from a mass grave near a church in torrential rain. Black bags were spread out in rows in the mud. None of the dead were Russian, he said. Most of them had been shot. The attorney general’s office is investigating the deaths and other massive civilian casualties as possible war crimes. After failing to occupy the Ukrainian capital and withdraw from northern Ukraine, Russia has turned its attention to Donbas, a predominantly Russian-speaking, industrial area in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels are fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control certain areas. The train station is located in government-controlled territory. Ukrainian officials warned residents this week to leave as soon as possible for safer parts of the country and said they and Russia had agreed to set up multiple evacuation routes to the east. One analyst said that only Russia would have a reason to attack the civilian railway infrastructure in Donbas and that Ukraine would not deliberately kill its civilians in “a war of survival”. “The Ukrainian army is desperately trying to strengthen units in the area… and the train stations in this area in the Ukrainian territory are critical to the movement of equipment and people,” said Justin Bronk, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Elsewhere in Donbas, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said Russia was gathering equipment and troops and stepping up bombings and shelling to help advance them. “We feel the end of the preparations for this huge discovery, for this great battle that will take place around us, in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he said in a televised address. In a video overnight, Zelensky said horrors worse than those in Bucha had already occurred in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital. “And what will happen when people find out the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Zelensky said late Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering during the Russian invasion. “There, on every street, is what people saw in Bukha and other cities in the Kiev region … The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes. “ The attorney general also expressed concern about the death toll in Borodyanka, where the process of retrieving bodies from buildings that had been bombed and collapsed had just begun. Twenty-six bodies were found Thursday from the rubble of just two buildings, Venediktova said. “We do not know what is under these houses,” he said, adding that it may take two weeks to find out. Motivated by reports that Russian forces had committed atrocities in areas around the capital, NATO nations agreed to increase arms supplies after Ukraine’s foreign minister called for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help deal with an expected east. Ukrainians and several Western leaders have blamed Moscow troops for the massacres. The weekly Der Spiegel reported that Germany’s foreign intelligence service was intercepting radio messages between Russian soldiers discussing the killing of civilians. Russia falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged. In a rare acknowledgment of the cost of the war to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov admitted to the British television network Sky News on Thursday that the country had suffered significant military losses, calling it a “tragedy”. He told reporters on Friday that his report on troop losses was based on the latest figures from Russia’s Defense Ministry, which said on March 25 that 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed in Ukraine. NATO has estimated that the casualties of Russia are multiple. In anticipation of intensifying attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages in the Mykolaiv and Khersona areas that were either attacked or occupied. Marina Morozova and her husband left Kherson, the first large city to fall to the Russians. “They are waiting for a big battle. We saw shells that did not explode. “It was scary,” he said. Morozova, 69, said only Russian television and radio were available. The Russians distributed humanitarian aid, he said, and filmed the distribution. The United Nations estimates that more than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of the war and that more than 12 million people have been trapped in areas under attack. On Thursday, a day after Russian forces began bombing their village south of Mykolaiv, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove north in his little blue Lada with his wife and mother-in-law to Bastanka, where they sought refuge. in a church. “They started destroying houses and everything,” Pavlo-Marianovka said. “Then the tanks appeared from the forest. “We thought there would be more bombing in the morning, so I decided to leave.” Two top European Union officials and the Slovak prime minister traveled to Kyiv on Friday in a bid to boost EU support for Ukraine. Prime Minister Edward Heger said he, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had made proposals for trade and humanitarian aid to Zelensky and his government. Heger also announced that his country had donated the Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine. Later, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nant said that the United States would develop a Patriot air defense system in Slovakia for as long as needed, provided that Ukraine acquired the S-300 long-range missile system. Zelensky had mentioned the S-300 by name when he spoke to US lawmakers via video link in March, calling for anti-aircraft systems that would allow Ukraine to “close the skies” on Russian warplanes and missiles. Western countries have stepped up sanctions against Russia following reports of atrocities near Kyiv. A day after the United States imposed sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, the European Union and Britain followed on Friday.
Anna reported from Bukha, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Chernihiv, Ukraine, and Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report.
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