Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of purposefully targeting civilians after 30 people were murdered when two buses were blown up in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, in one of the bloodiest single strikes for weeks.
AFP reports local officials uploaded photographs of the burnt-out metal shell of the trucks, with bodies and debris strewn over the road, after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the act “will not go unanswered”.
“Russia is trying to destroy all life in (the) Donbas (region) and the world must respond to this,” he wrote on Telegram adding that the death toll could increase.
Police stated the buses were struck by a glide bomb. Three other individuals were killed by shelling in an adjacent community, rescue services said.
The strikes come a day after five children were among 22 killed when a Russian missile smashed a five-storey apartment complex in Pryluky, in the northern Chernigiv district.
“The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians,” said Donetsk Governor Vadym Filashkin, accusing Moscow of flouting “every conceivable rule of warfare and norm of international humanitarian law”.
It was described by the Kramatorsk City Council “another heinous crime by the Russian army against the civilian population”.
It said the Russians had “again targeted a place where there are absolutely no military targets”.
Civilian Casualties
Concern has been increasing about the number of civilian casualties in the nearly five-year battle as both sides push up long-range attacks outside their boundaries.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has accused its forces of purposefully targeting and killing people.
The United Nations has recorded more than 17,000 civilian deaths in the war, but claims the real number is much higher.
Zelensky last week accused his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of ordering large strikes on civilian sites, an accusation the Kremlin denies.
“There is no clearer sign of Putin’s evil, evil intent and strategy in this conflict”, said visiting UK foreign minister Ed Miliband touring the site of the Pryluky attack yesterday.
Putin assured reporters once he was going to win on the battlefield, London declared fresh penalties on Moscow. He’s trying to win by terrorising civilians.”
Zelensky encouraged the US to “increase the pressure” on Russia including supplying improved air defence systems to push Putin to the bargaining table.
Security Went Downhill
The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, has been targeted by a growing number of strikes, including a volley of Russian ballistic and cruise missiles and swift, jet-powered drones on Wednesday.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, stated yesterday that three people had been murdered and 14 wounded.
The rail network, energy grid and key transport bridges in the city have been attacked.
Kyiv had been spared the carnage of the front line for the first few years of the war, but should now be on a war footing, he claimed.
Kramatorsk, a major city in the eastern Donetsk region, which Moscow says it has annexd and which has not yet been taken by Russia, had a population of around 150,000 before the war.
It has served as a logistics and supply center for the Ukrainian military for much of the battle and is part of the so-called “fortress belt” that troops are trying to hang on to.
Russian troops have pushed to the eastern outskirts of the city and have called on remaining people to move to safer parts of Ukraine.
Filashkin told The Associated Press yesterday’s strike was a “sharp deterioration” in security and ordered the suspension of public transport in Kramatorsk and adjacent Sloviansk.
Last month Ukraine said it had made modest gains in a counter-offensive against Russian troops at Lyman to the north of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, retaking pockets of terrain.
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