Russian Missile Kills 30 Civilians at Railroad Depot, Ukraine Says

CHERNIHIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian leaders predicted more gruesome discoveries would be made in reclaimed cities and towns as Russian soldiers retreat to focus on eastern Ukraine, where officials said a Russian rocket attack on a packed train station used to evacuate civilians killed over 30 people Friday.Hours after warning that Ukraine’s forces already had found worse scenes of brutality in a settlement north of Kyiv, President Zelensky said that “thousands” of people were at the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, when it was hit by a missile.Mr. Zelensky accompanied a social media post with photos that showed a train car with smashed windows, abandoned luggage and bodies lying in what looked like an outdoor waiting area. Authorities said the strike wounded more than 100 people.“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. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”After failing to take Ukraine’s capital, 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.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 establish multiple evacuation routes in the east. Kramatorsk is located in government-controlled territory.In his nightly video address, Mr. Zelensky predicted more gruesome discoveries would be made in northern cities and towns from which the Russians withdrew in order to concentrate on eastern Ukraine. He said evidence of civilians killed at close range and dumped on streets in Bucha already had surfaced in a worse way in Borodianka, another settlement outside the capital.“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Mr. Zelensky said late Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering since Russia invaded Ukraine. “There on every street is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region after the departure of the Russian troops. The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”Spurred by reports that Russian forces committed atrocities in areas surrounding the capital, NATO nations agreed to increase their supply of arms after Ukraine’s foreign minister pleaded for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help face down an expected offensive in the east.Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians during the Russian occupation. Most victims died from gunshots, not from shelling, he said, and some corpses with their hands tied were “dumped like firewood” into mass graves, including one at a children’s camp.Mr. Fedoruk said 320 civilians were confirmed dead as of Wednesday, but he expected more as bodies are found in the city that was home to 50,000 people. Only 3,700 remain, he said.In his nightly address, Mr. Zelensky said Bucha’s horrors may be only the beginning. In the northern city of Borodianka, just 20 miles northwest of Bucha, he warned of even more casualties, saying “there it is much more horrible.”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.A Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that Russia has suffered major troop casualties during its six-week military operation in Ukraine.“Yes, we have significant losses of troops and it is a huge tragedy for us,” a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told Sky News.Mr. 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.”On Thursday, a day after Russian forces began shelling their village in the southern Mykolaiv region, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove north in his small blue Lada with his wife and mother-in-law to Bashtanka, where they sought shelter in a church.“They started destroying the houses and everything” in Pavlo-Marianovka, he said. “Then the tanks appeared from the forest. We thought that in the morning there would be shelling again, so I decided to leave.”Hundreds of people have fled villages in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions that are either under attack or occupied by Russian forces.Marina Morozova and her husband fled from Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russians.“They are waiting for a big battle. We saw shells that did not explode. It was horrifying,” she said.Ms. Morozova, 69, said only Russian television and radio was available. The Russians handed out humanitarian aid, she said, and filmed the distribution.Anxious to keep moving away from Russian troops, the couple and others boarded a van that would take them west. Some will try to leave the country, while others will remain in quieter parts of Ukraine.The United Nations estimates the war has displaced at least 6.5 million people within the country.The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said that more than 4.3 million, half of them children, have left Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on February 24 and sparked Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.The International Organization for Migration estimates more than 12 million people are stranded in areas of Ukraine under attack.______Andrea Rosa and other Associated Press journalists contributed to this dispatch.

Russian Missile Kills 30 Civilians at Railroad Depot, Ukraine Says

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