Kramatorsk
Bodies are covered with plastic sheets after a rocket attack on April 8 at a train station in Kramatorsk on April 8.
Thirty-nine people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in a Russian missile strike on a railway station in eastern Ukraine in what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said was a deliberate attack on civilians.


Comment: The propaganda is immediate and unequivocal. It is also mere assertion. Things aren't so cut-and-dried.


Ukraine's state railway company said two Russian rockets struck the station on April 8 in Kramatorsk, which was being used to evacuate civilians from areas that are expected to come under heavy attack as Moscow redirects its war efforts to focus on eastern areas where the separatists it has backed since 2014 have been fighting Ukrainian troops.

"Lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population," Zelenskiy said in a statement. "This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop."


Comment: Zelensky is a war criminal. The evil of the Ukrainian regime seemingly has no limits, and if not punished, will never stop. After all, the Ukrainian military has been deliberately killing its own civilians for 8 years. The fascist contingent sees Ukraine's Russian speakers as subhuman. It deliberately fired a Tochka-U into downtown Donetsk just weeks ago. It seems it did the same again, this time in Kramatorsk. To put it plainly: Ukrainian military butchers its own citizens, then blames Russia.


Zelenskiy later said in a video address to Finland's parliament that Europe cannot offer a "partial response" to Russia and its aggression "because freedom will not survive if we leave the channels of tyranny."

Video and images posted on social media showed dozens of dead civilians next to backpacks and suitcases they were carrying with them.

Ukrainian officials, including Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration, said at least four children were among the dead.

"The Russians are deliberately trying to disrupt the evacuation of civilians.... For them, people's lives are just a bargaining chip and an instrument to achieve their cynical goal," Kyrylenko said.


Comment: Simply reverse official Ukrainian statements to arrive at the truth. It is Ukraine trying to disrupt civilian evacuation, as they have been doing for the last month. Civilians are only useful to them as human shields. How's that for cynical?


Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko said about 4,000 people had been at the station at the time of the attack.

Both the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry denied Russia was responsible for the attack.

The remains of a large rocket with the words "for our children" in Russian was lying just adjacent to the main building.


Comment: According to the BBC, "za detei" means "for or on behalf of the children" (not "our"), i.e. "for the kids". Shades of the IDF.


"I'm looking for my husband. He was here. I can't reach him," a woman told AFP, sobbing and holding her phone to her ear.

Another woman in a state of shock said: "I was in the station. I heard like a double explosion. I rushed to the wall for protection.

"Then I saw people covered in blood entering the station and bodies everywhere on the ground."

The attack came as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Josep Borrell, the European Union's top diplomat, and Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger were in Kyiv for talks with Zelenskiy.

As their train from Poland arrived in Kyiv, von der Leyen said in a tweet that the attack on the station in Kramatorsk was "despicable."