'50 people killed' by Russian strike on Ukraine train station used for evacuation
A Russian rocket attack on a Ukrainian train station has killed 50 people including five children who were trying to flee the area, authorities have claimed.
According to local media, around four thousand people were trying to flee the area from Kramatorsk train station in the east of Ukraine when a rocket hit it on Friday morning.
Graphic pictures of the scene showed bodies strewn across the station, next to their few belongings they had packed to take with them to their news lives.
Donetsk Oblast Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in the aftermath of the attack that 50 people had died in the attack, and a further 98 - including 16 children - had been taken to hospital.
Pictures of the rocket shared by journalists at the scene showed it had "for our children" written on the side.
They were being evacuated amid fears Russian forces are going to escalate their attempts to take the area.
Read more: Destruction in Borodyanka 'significantly more dreadful' than war-torn Bucha, says Zelenskyy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed casualties in a social media post, adding: "[Russian forces] are cynically destroying the civilian population.
"This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop," he wrote.
Zelenskyy said no Ukrainian soldiers were at the station when it was targeted.
A witness said: “I saw and heard the shelling of burning cars and the tail from the Russian missile.
“It was difficult to get to the station itself because of the burning cars parked nearby – people were scared and ran in different directions."
A family, with luggage and children in tow, are also seen running away from the site of the explosion in fear as cars and soldiers block the road to the station.
The onlooker, who has not been named, added: "As it happened, I immediately ran out of the house to help people.
“At the station there were exclusively civilian - not military - women and children who were trying to get out of the city because of the impending danger from the Russian army."
Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksander Honcharenko said about 4,000 people had been at the station at the time of the attack, mostly women, elderly people and children.
"They (Russian forces) wanted to hit the station," Mayor Honcharenko said.
Presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said: "It must be understood that such strikes are preceded by a thorough reconnaissance of the target, at least by drones, gunners on the ground - it's too expensive a missile and too difficult and risky to organize such strikes."
"They (Russian forces) could clearly see that they were striking civilians early in the morning, that there were thousands of people trying to evacuate at the station at that time - families, children, the elderly."
He added some of those wounded were in serious conditions.
It comes after Russia was expelled from the UN Human Rights Council after delegates voted 93 to 24 to remove them following allegations of Russian soldiers carrying out mass killings, rape and torture in Ukraine.
The vote came after a push from the US, with the draft text for the vote expressing "grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine".
Fifty-eight nations abstained from the vote.
A two-thirds majority of voting members in the 193-member General Assembly in New York was needed to suspend Russia from the 47-member Geneva-based Human Rights Council.