Missile kills dozen evacuees at Ukrainian train station Russian Defense

KYIV/MOSCOW: A missile hit a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians, killing dozens of people, Ukrainian authorities said Friday after warning they expected even worse evidence of war crimes in parts of the country previously held by Russian troops.
Ukrainian President VolodymyrZelenskyy said that thousands of people were at the train station when the missile struck. The Russian Defense Ministry denied targeting the station
in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy blamed Russia for the bodies lying in what looked like an outdoor waiting area.
“The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. Without the strength or courage to stand up to 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 it is not punished, then it will never stop.”
The regional governor of Donetsk, PavloKyrylenko, later said that 39 people were killed and 87 wounded.
The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russian
forces arrived. “The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” Prosecutor General IrynaVenediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew.
Venediktova spoke as workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under spitting rain. Black body bags were laid out in rows in the mud. None of the dead were Russians; she said.
Most of them had been shot. The prosecutor general’s office is investigating the deaths as possible war crimes.
After failing to take Ukraine’s capital and withdrawing from northern Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years
and control some areas. The train station is located in government-controlled territory.
Ukrainian and several Western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported Germany’s foreign intelligence agency intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers discussing killings of civilians. Russia
has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
In a rare acknowledgment of the war’s cost to Russia, a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that the country has suffered major troop causalities during its six-week military operation
in Ukraine. “Yes, we have significant losses of troops and it is a huge tragedy for us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told British broadcaster Sky.
Peskov also hinted the fighting might be over “in the foreseeable future,” telling Sky that Russian troops were “doing their best to bring an end to that operation.”
Asked about his remarks Friday, Peskov said his reference to troop losses was based on the most recent Russian Defense Ministry numbers. The ministry reported on March 25 that a total of 1,351 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine