Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that over 200 Ukrainian troops were killed in a railway station attack in central Ukraine. However, Kyiv has said that the attack left 25 people, including children, dead. An 11-year-old boy was found under the rubble of a house and a six-year-old was killed in a car fire near the train station. There is no clarity whether all those who lost their lives in the attack were civilians.
“As a result of a direct hit by an Iskander missile on a military train at the Chaplyne railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk region, more than 200 servicemen of the reserve of Ukraine’s Armed Forces and 10 units of military equipment were destroyed,” the ministry said in its daily briefing.
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It added that the train was “en route to combat zones” in the eastern Donbas region that Moscow seeks to fully control.
Moscow also said it had destroyed eight Ukrainian fighter jets in strikes at air bases in Ukraine’s Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The train station strike happened on Ukraine’s Independence Day and the six-month milestone of Russia’s invasion on Wednesday. Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned that Moscow might attempt “something particularly cruel” this week.
Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives in the offensive that began in February, even though Russia has maintained that it is only targeting legitimate military targets and was doing its best to spare civilians, even if that meant slowing down its offensive in Ukraine.
United Nations’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, on Thursday, termed Russia’s war on its neighbour as “unimaginably horrifying.” She called on Putin “to halt armed attacks against Ukraine”.
(With inputs from agencies)
