On Friday, April 8, a new mass murder of civilians was committed in Ukraine. A missile attack hit Kramatorsk . train station, in the Donbass, as several thousand Ukrainians rushed to flee the war. The attack came as Russia stepped up its pressure on this region of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities recorded at least 52 deaths on Friday evening, including five children. This assessment could change, however, as more than a dozen of these victims have died in hospital, out of a total of nearly 100 injured.
The attack took place at 10:30 a.m. even as train evacuations resumed after a hiatus related to the destruction of part of the railway line. It was immediately attributed to Russia, in particular because of the inscription in Russian found on a missile on the spot, “for our children”a recurrent manifestation of pro-Russian separatists in Donbass since the start of the war in the region in 2014.
According to a police officer present at the Kramatorsk station, it was a Tochka-U missile, ie a “ cluster bomb”† According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), who conducted observations on the spot, the victims were actually mowed down in at least four places in the station, including the main platform and the forecourt. “The Russians carried out two rocket attacks and used cluster munitions For its part, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry assured.
The use of cluster munitions has been prohibited in principle since 2008 by an international treaty: the Oslo Convention. But neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor the United States are signatories. It is not the first time that Moscow has been accused of using this type of weapon. On March 28, the Ukrainian Attorney General stated that she had “evidence of the use of cluster bombs in the Odessa region and in the Kherson region”, adding that studies were underway to certify it.
denial of Moscow
As with any allegation of abuse, Moscow very quickly denied any involvement in the Kramatorsk massacre on Friday. The Russian Ministry of Defense accused “the Kiev regime” to have ” orchestrated » spanking her for “prevent the population from leaving the city to use it as a human shield”† However, this denial comes after Moscow announced earlier today that it had destroyed with high-precision missiles “armament” at Pokrovsk, Sloviansk and Barvinkove stations, not far from Kramatorsk.
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