Kramatorsk

The Russian military appeared to target fleeing civilians Friday, when a Tochka-U missile slammed into a train station in Kramatorsk, killing dozens and injuring hundreds.

The city, near Donetsk, is the main evacuation point for thousands of women and children fleeing violence in the east, where the Russian military is widely expected to launch a vigorous campaign aimed at consolidating control over separatist-held regions after a series of strategic failures in the west.

Images from platforms at the rail hub released by Ukrainian officials depicted luggage and bodies strewn across blood-stained brick. The visual (below) is harrowing enough on its own, but there were more graphic depictions as well.

The Kremlin claimed the missile found at the scene wasn’t Russia’s and suggested the visuals depicted a false flag attack perpetrated by Ukraine on its own citizens.

And yet, just hours earlier, Russia did in fact target one of the only available rail routes from Kramatorsk to safer locales in the west. “All three trains with refugees were cut off as a result of an enemy strike on [an] overpass,” Donetsk Railway announced, in a social media post.

“Russia’s defense ministry initially said it used high-precision rockets on three railway stations in the Donbas today,” the FT‘s Moscow bureau chief remarked, adding that “after the scale of the casualties in Kramatorsk became clear, it claimed the strike was a ‘provocation’ that ‘has nothing to do with reality.'”

Clearly, the attack will further galvanize international opinion. Reports out of Bucha, where Russian forces tortured and executed civilians, are more macabre by the day. On Thursday, The New York Times verified that Berlin is, in fact, in possession of Russian radio traffic which implicates the military in civilian executions. Der Spiegel originally detailed the intelligence.

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The New Yorker this week published a horrific account including some of the most difficult images yet to emerge from Bucha. “[A] number of corpses had been severely burned beside a garbage pile. It was hard to say how many there were — charred legs and torsos were severed and scattered — but one victim appeared to be a woman, another a child or an adolescent,” Luke Mogelson wrote.

James Nachtwey’s black and white photographs showed the bodies. “Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the parts,” Mogelson continued. “Several people reported that Russians had brought the bodies on a tank, dumped them, and lit them on fire.”

The Kramatorsk tragedy came just a day after the UN General Assembly suspended Russia from the Human Rights Council, a move Moscow blamed on a US conspiracy. The Kremlin continues to deny its forces have harmed civilians.

The railway targeted by Russia on Friday has carried nearly a quarter of a million people out of the Donestk region to (relative) safety since late February.

Josep Borrell who, along with Ursula von der Leyen, will meet Zelenskiy in Kyiv, called the Kramatorsk strike “yet another attempt to close escape routes for those fleeing this unjustified war and cause human suffering.”

Zelenskiy mocked Putin’s army which, frankly, has been exposed as rickety and inefficient, just like the state apparatus that commands it. Russia has “neither the forces nor the bravery to face us in battle,” Zelenskiy said Friday. “They are destroying the civilian population instead.”