A new massacre of civilians was committed in Ukraine on Friday 8 April. A missile strike hit Kramatorsk railway station in Donbass as several thousand Ukrainians rushed to flee the war. The attack came as Russia intensifies its pressure on this region of eastern Ukraine. At least 52 dead, including five children, were recorded Friday evening by the Ukrainian authorities. However, this assessment could change, more than a dozen of these victims having died in hospital, out of a total of nearly a hundred people injured.
The attack took place at 10:30 a.m. even as train evacuations resumed after a hiatus linked 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 the spot on a missile, “for our children”a recurring expression of pro-Russian separatists in Donbass since the start of the war in this region in 2014.
According to a policeman present at the Kramatorsk station, it was a Tochka-U missile, i.e. a “ cluster bomb ». According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), which conducted on-the-spot observations, 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 missile strikes and they used cluster munitions “, assured for its part the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The use of cluster munitions has in principle been prohibited since 2008 by an international treaty: the Oslo Convention. But neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor the United States are signatories. This is not the first time that Moscow has been accused of using this type of weapon. On March 28, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General declared that she had “evidence of the use of cluster bombs in the Odessa region and in the Kherson region”, adding that investigations were underway to certify it.
Moscow denial
As with every accusation of abuse, Moscow very quickly denied, on Friday, any involvement in the Kramatorsk massacre. The Russian Ministry of Defense accused “the kyiv regime” having ” orchestrated » hit her for “prevent the departure of the population of the city in order to be able to use it as a human shield”. This denial, however, comes after Moscow announced earlier today that it had destroyed with high-precision missiles “armaments” at the stations of Pokrovsk, Sloviansk and Barvinkove, not far from Kramatorsk.
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