প্রকাশ: 09/04/2022
A missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine where
thousands had gathered Friday, killing at least 52 and wounding dozens more in
an attack on a crowd of mostly women and children trying to flee a new, looming
Russian offensive, Ukrainian authorities said.
The attack, denounced by some as yet another war crime in
the 6-week-old conflict, came as workers unearthed bodies from a mass grave in
Bucha, a town near Ukraine’s capital where dozens of killings have been
documented after a Russian pullout.
Photos from the station in Kramatorsk showed the dead
covered with tarps, and the remnants of a rocket with the words “For the
children” painted on it in Russian. About 4,000 civilians had been in and
around the station, heeding calls to leave before fighting intensifies in the
Donbas region, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who says he expects
a tough global response, and other leaders accused Russia’s military of
deliberately attacking the station. Russia, in turn, blamed Ukraine, saying it
doesn’t use the kind of missile that hit the station — a contention experts
dismissed.
Zelenskyy told Ukrainians in his nightly video address
Friday that efforts would be taken “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 to.”
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, in the
Donbas, said 52 people were killed, including five children, and many dozens
more were wounded.
“There are many people in a serious condition, without arms
or legs,” Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko said, adding that the local
hospital was struggling to treat everyone.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace denounced the attack as
a war crime, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “completely
unacceptable.”
“There are almost no words for it,” European Union
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in Ukraine, told reporters. “The
cynical behavior (by Russia) has almost no benchmark anymore.”
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly
accused Russian forces of atrocities in the war that began with a Feb. 24
invasion. More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions
more have been displaced. Some of the grisliest evidence has been found in
towns around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, from which Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s troops pulled back in recent days.
In Bucha, Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk has said investigators
found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians and were still
finding bodies in yards, parks and city squares — 90% of whom were shot.
Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were
staged.
On Friday, workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a
town church under spitting rain, lining up black body bags in rows in the mud.
About 67 people were buried in the grave, according to a statement from
Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova’s office.
“Like the massacres in Bucha, like many other Russian war
crimes, the missile attack on Kramatorsk should be one of the charges at the
tribunal that must be held,” Zelenskyy said, his voice rising in anger late
Friday.
He expounded on that theme in an excerpted interview with
CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Friday, citing communications intercepted by the
Ukrainian security service.
“There are (Russian) soldiers talking with their parents
about what they stole and who they abducted. There are recordings of (Russian)
prisoners of war who admitted to killing people,” he said. “There are pilots in
prison who had maps with civilian targets to bomb. There are also
investigations being conducted based on the remains of the dead.”
Zelenskyy’s comments echo reporting from Der Spiegel saying
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency had intercepted Russian military radio
traffic in which soldiers may have discussed civilian killings in Bucha. The
weekly also reported that the recordings indicated the Russian mercenary Wagner
Group was involved in atrocities there.
German government officials would not confirm or deny the
report, but two former German ministers filed a war crimes complaint Thursday.
Russia has denied that its military was involved in war crimes.
Russian forces, who pulled back after failing to take the
capital in the face of stiff resistance, have now set their sights on the
Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region where Moscow-backed
rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some
areas.
A senior U.S. defense official said Friday that the Pentagon
believes some of the retreating units were so badly damaged they are “for all
intents and purposes eradicated.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity
to discuss internal military assessments.
The official did not say how many units sustained such extensive
damage, but said the U.S. believes Russia has lost between 15% and 20% of its
combat power overall since the war began. While some combat units are
withdrawing to be resupplied in Russia, Moscow has added thousands of troops
around Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, he said.
The train station hit is in Ukrainian government-controlled
territory in the Donbas, but Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of
carrying out the attack. So did the region’s Moscow-backed separatists, who
work closely with Russian regular troops.
Western experts refuted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov’s
assertion that Russian forces “do not use” that type of missile, saying Russia
has used it during the war. One analyst added that only Russia would have
reason to target railway infrastructure in the Donbas.
“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,” said Justin
Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Bronk pointed to other occasions when Russian authorities
have tried to deflect blame by claiming their forces no longer use an older
weapon “to kind of muddy the waters and try and create doubt.” He also
suggested that Russia specifically chose the missile type because Ukraine also
has it.
A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to
discuss intelligence, also said Russia’s forces have used the missile — and
that given the strike’s location and impact, it was “likely” Russia’s.
Ukrainian officials have almost daily pleaded with Western
powers to send more arms, and to further punish Russia with sanctions and
exclusion of Russian banks from the global financial system.
NATO nations agreed Thursday to increase their supply of
weapons, and Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced on a trip to
Ukraine on Friday that his country has donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense
system to Ukraine. Zelenskyy had appealed for S-300s to help the country “close
the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
American and Slovak officials said the U.S. will then deploy
a Patriot missile system to Slovakia.
After meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday, during which he
urged the EU to impose a full embargo on Russian oil and gas, von der Leyen
provided him with a questionnaire that is a first step for applying for EU
membership.
Elsewhere, in anticipation of intensified attacks by Russian
forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages that were either under fire or
occupied in the southern regions of Mykolaiv and Kherson.
In the northeast’s Kharkiv, Lidiya Mezhiritska stood in the
wreckage of her home after overnight missile strikes turned it to rubble.
“The ‘Russian world,’ as they say,” she said, wryly invoking
Putin’s nationalist justification for invading Ukraine. “People, children, old
people, women are dying. I don’t have a machine gun. I would definitely go
(fight), regardless of age.”
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