The death toll in Friday's rocket attack on a train station in eastern Ukraine is now at least 50, with at least five children among the dead, Ukrainian authorities say. Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko says at least 87 people were wounded and surgeons at local hospitals are struggling to deal with the influx of patients in critical condition, many of them missing limbs, the Guardian reports. Ukrainian authorities say a Russian rocket hit the Kramatorsk train station, where thousands of people were trying to heed calls to flee the region for safer parts of Ukraine before an expected Russian offensive.
The attack left the station strewn with bodies and luggage, reports the New York Times. "There are so many corpses, there are children, there are just children," a woman can be heard screaming in video of the scene. Authorities say most of the people at the station were women, children, and the elderly, with no Ukrainian troops present. A missile remnant near the station entrance had the words "For the children" written on it in Russian, which is believed to be a reference to revenge for children killed in areas controlled by Russian-speaking separatists, the Washington Post reports. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, accused Russia of "murderous deliberate slaughter."
The attack was condemned internationally with Ben Wallace, Britain's defense minister, calling it a war crime. “These were precision missiles aimed at people trying to seek humanitarian shelter,” he said. Analysts rejected Russia's claims that it didn't carry out the attack, the AP reports. " The Ukrainian military is desperately trying to reinforce units in the area … and the railway stations in that area in Ukrainian-held territory are critical for movement of equipment and people,” says Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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