PM Jacinda Ardern responds to claims made by our Russian embassy that alleged war crimes in Ukraine are a hoax. Video / Mark Mitchell
A blue baby buggy stood unattended on the blood-smeared platform, surrounded by abandoned luggage. Telephones rang in abandoned bags.
Relatives frantically searched for news of missing family members who were meant to be on the train.
The Tochka-U missile that unloaded its payload of cluster bomblets at about 10.30 yesterday morning turned Kramatorsk's crowded railway station into a scene of devastation.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were waiting for the next train for evacuation from the east, where Russia is now expected to focus its assault, to safety in Ukraine's west.
Dasha, an 18-year-old local, told the Daily Telegraph: "I was there and saw everything. A rocket was flying in the sky, fragments fell to the ground and hit the cars and people. Cars exploded and people died.
A train damaged by Russian shelling at the railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Photo / AP
The sub-munitions - a Tochka carries about 50 of them - landed on both sides of the station building, among passengers already on the platforms and those waiting to enter from the carpark.
Oleksiy Honcharenko, the mayor of Kramatorsk, told Ukrainian television that surgeons at local hospitals had been overwhelmed trying to treat grievous injuries, including "many missing arms and legs". Surgeons were simultaneously trying to treat 30 or 40 victims.
"There were 40 people killed instantly and about 100 people wounded," Vyacheslav Zaporozhets, a volunteer with Lazar, a Ukrainian medical charity, told The Telegraph from a Kramatorsk hospital.
Several could not be saved.
By mid-afternoon, the death toll had climbed to 50, including 12 wounded people who died after reaching hospitals. There were at least five children among the dead. There was no immediate news about the baby who had ridden in the blue pram or its parents.
Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. Kramatorsk station is a civilian facility that serves intercity trains travelling across the country.
The Telegraph could not immediately confirm whether there was a legitimate military target in the area at the time of the attack. But Ukrainian authorities had no time for the suggestion that the slaughter might be a case of unintentional collateral damage.
Authorities are expecting a major Russian offensive to turn the city into a battlefield in the next few weeks.
For the past several days, the passenger railway station has been crammed with civilians heeding calls to evacuate while there is still time.
Honcharenko said about 4000 people were crowded onto the platform and the carpark at the time of yesterday's attack.
It would be impossible for Russian reconnaissance to be unaware of that, and Ukrainian officials insisted the choice of target was deliberate.
"Lacking the strength and courage to fight with us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population. This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop," said Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
"The 'Rashists' ['Russian fascists'] knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible," said Pavlo Kirilenko, the head of Donetsk region.
The carcass of the rocket was later found lying on a patch of grass a few dozen metres away. It bore a message, daubed in large capitals with white paint: "for the children".
The Russian soldiers who painted it either thought they were making a point about the imagined righteousness of their cause - or a deliberately sick joke.
Instead, they provided an unintentional summary of the total war Russia's Government is now clearly waging against Ukrainian civilians. From central Kharkiv to Mariupol's maternity hospital and the Kyiv suburbs like Bucha and Hostemel, Russia's war effort has shown a disregard for civilian life that by now looks more deliberate than careless.
A Russian missile that killed more than 30 people and injured more than 100 in an attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Photo / Getty Images
In the first days of the war, a cluster munitions rocket hit a Kharkiv blood bank - a critical asset for a city under siege. Last month, Russian airstrikes hit a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Then they hit a theatre sheltering hundreds of civilians in the same city - ignoring the warning "CHILDREN" written on the tarmac outside in letters so big they could be seen by satellites.
The bodies of civilian travellers lying among their luggage on a Donbas morning yesterday recalled an earlier war crime. In the summer of 2014, a Russian anti-aircraft missile shot down a Malaysian airline's Boeing 777, scattering mutilated bodies and suitcases across fields 95km southeast of the Kramatorsk tragedy.
Now as then, the Kremlin's response was a clumsy and transparent denial, followed by blaming Ukraine.
At an earlier daily news briefing, the Russian ministry of defence did not mention the missile attack on Kramatorsk but it did reference three "high precision air-launched missile" attacks on stations in the neighbouring towns of Pokrovsk, Slavyansk and Barvinkove.
Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Russian military spokesman, said the attacks "destroyed weapons and military equipment of the Ukrainian military reserves arriving in Donbas".
But within an hour, it had issued a denial. No strikes were carried out or planned against Kramatorsk, it said. Only the Ukrainian armed forces operate those missiles, it claimed.
In fact, Russia has been using Tochka-U missiles in Ukraine at least since early March. The booster units left behind after cluster strikes have been seen on battlefields from Mariupol in the south to Chernihiv in the north.
Zvezda, the defence ministry's own television channel, reported on Russian and Belarusian forces using Tochka-U missiles during drills just a week before the invasion began.
An evangelical church becomes a shelter for the survivors of the missile attack near the Kramatorsk railway station. Photo / Getty Images
And just as with the MH17 tragedy, pro-Russian propaganda and social media outlets initially celebrated the attacks as a successful strike on the Ukrainian military.
Beneath a video showing smoke billowing and debris scattered across streets, the Kremlin-linked Russian journalist Dmitry Steshin wrote: "Ten minutes ago this happened at the Kramatorsk railway station. A group of militants of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was working here." The post was later deleted, but not before it had been preserved for posterity by re-posts and screenshots.
Another pro-Russian Telegram account issued a veiled warning the previous evening. In a post at 9.09pm on Thursday evening, the anonymous author said people should avoid evacuating from the Donetsk region through train stations. He repeated the warning at 9.15am, just as the missiles hit the train stations.
Horrifying to see Russia strike one of the main stations used by civilians evacuating the region where Russia is stepping up its attack.
Action is needed: more sanctions on Russia and more weapons to #Ukraine are under way from the EU. 5th package of EU sanctions just approved.
"It is a war crime indiscriminately to attack civilians, and Russia's crimes in Ukraine will not go unnoticed or unpunished," he said at a press conference.
The White House decried the "horrific and devastating images" of the attack.
Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, who was in Kyiv with the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, condemned on Twitter "yet another attempt to close escape routes for those fleeing this unjustified war".
I strongly condemn this morning’s indiscriminate attack against a train station in #Kramatorsk by Russia, which killed dozens of people and left many more wounded. This is yet another attempt to close escape routes for those fleeing this unjustified war and cause human suffering
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) April 8, 2022
The strike comes ahead of what threatens to become one of the most violent battles of the war to date.
Russia has publicly said that it intends to focus on the "liberation" of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which are claimed as sovereign territory by two Moscow-curated separatist "republics" established during an earlier invasion in 2014.
It has reinforced its units in the area and appears to be attempting a large envelopment of the Ukrainian troops concentrated along the old line of contact with the separatist "republics".
By surrounding and destroying those soldiers, and "liberating" the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Putin may hope to force Zelenskyy to the negotiating table and extract a punishing peace agreement that he could present in Moscow as a victory.
But if the operation fails, Vladimir Putin will be forced to choose between continuing an expensive war with no clear path to victory or ordering a humiliating withdrawal.
A fragment of a Tochka-U missile lies on the ground following an attack at the railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Photo / AP
Western officials believe Putin is pressuring his generals to deliver a success before Russia's May 9 Victory Day holiday, giving them just a month to complete the encirclement.
For the Ukrainians, the stakes are even higher. Defeat would mean the loss of the most capable part of its army and a significant swathe of territory.
A Russian spearhead pushing south towards Slavyansk and Kramatorsk has made slow but steady progress over the past week, but the exact line of control is unclear.
Russia claimed to have finally captured the besieged port city of Mariupol in the southern Donetsk region yesterday. Ukrainian forces immediately claimed to retain control of large parts of it.
Ukrainian authorities have called on residents of the eastern Luhansk, Donetsk and Kharkiv regions to leave urgently.
The systematic targeting of railways in Donbas over the past two days appears designed to prevent Ukraine from moving in reinforcements and to block evacuation efforts, which makes the cities more difficult to defend.
Video from #Kramatorsk train station. All the people trapped. Now you understand why mothers write contact details on their children’s bodies. pic.twitter.com/XFnIfcVF1B
Kirilenko, the head of the Donetsk region military-civil administration, insisted the evacuation efforts would continue but that security would be reviewed, with updates for individual towns on the new plans.
"The enemy has surveillance and monitoring tools. They clearly understood that this is a city, this is a railway station there are people there. They only do it to prevent people from leaving our region," he said.
Those who left on earlier trains are the lucky ones. But as so many Ukrainian refugees have already found, it is a painful kind of safety.
Valeriya Novikova, 23, who left from the same station just a few days earlier, said: "By train, we left as then there was the possibility of escape.
"We waited until the last in the hope that suddenly everything would work out and the war would end.
"Now I'm unemployed and homeless. I had everything and now I have nothing but a suitcase with things. For the first time, I felt how it is when the soul hurts. It is very bad, I cried and still cry every day.
"Antidepressants don't help. There is nothing better than your home."
