At least 25 killed in Russian missile attack on crowded train station
(Update 2: adds detail)
Lviv, Ukraine, Aug 25 (EFE).- The death toll in a Russian missile attack on a crowded train station in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in southeastern Ukraine, rose to 25, including two children, authorities said Thursday.
“As a result of the shelling of the residential sector and the railway station, 25 people died, two of them children,” deputy head of presidential staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko wrote on Telegram.
“An 11-year-old boy died under the rubble of a household, another 6-year-old child died in a car fire outside the railway station,” he added.
Another 31 people were injured in the strike that hit the Chaplyne railway station on Wednesday, Ukraine’s Independence Day and also the six-month milestone since the Russian invasion began.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported the attack during a United Nations Security Council meeting Wednesday.
“Chaplyne is our sorrow today, (…) we will see to it that the (Russian) occupiers are held accountable for all they have done. And we will certainly expel the invaders from our land,” he told the meeting.
He said the projectiles directly impacted several passenger trains and that four of them were on fire, adding that the number of victims could rise as rescue crews went through the wreckage.
“This is how we’re living each day. It’s as if Russia made preparations for this meeting of the Security Council,” he said.
Western leaders strongly condemned the attack.
“The EU strongly condemns another heinous attack by Russia on civilians: in Chaplyne on Ukraine Independence Day,” the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, wrote on Twitter.
“Those responsible for Russian rocket terror will be held accountable,” he added.
United States secretary of state Antony Blinken echoed that sentiment.
“Russia’s missile strike on a train station full of civilians in Ukraine fits a pattern of atrocities. We will continue, together with partners from around the world, to stand with Ukraine and seek accountability for Russian officials,” Blinken tweeted.
Kyiv said Moscow’s claims that it had killed 200 Ukrainian soldiers in the attack was a “lie and more propaganda by a terrorist country.”
“I see the strike as a continuation of Russia’s terror tactics which grows from their inability to advance on the battlefield,” advisor to Ukraine’s minister of defense, Yuriy Sak, told Efe.
Sak added that Moscow’s claims were a way to justify its invasion of Ukraine to the Russian people.
Only five out of every 100 objects attacked by Russia since the start of the invasion were of military character, the advisor claimed.
“This shows that Russia is a country that does not know how to fight and relies on terror instead,” he added. EFE
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