At Least 50 Killed in Russian Strike on Kramatorsk Station (VIDEO)

Complete horror.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Russian Missile Attack Kills Dozens at Railway Station in Eastern Ukraine":

Moscow pressed its offensive in the Donbas area as Kyiv assessed the scale of damage around the capital A Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed 50 people and injured nearly 100 trying to flee the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, in one of the largest single attacks on evacuees since the conflict began.

Around 4,000 people from across eastern Ukraine had gathered at the train station, a railroad hub for the region, waiting for evacuation days after Ukrainian officials told residents to leave ahead of a renewed Russian offensive in Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a ballistic Tochka-U missile had struck the station. Photographs posted on social media by Mr. Zelensky showed bodies strewn on the ground and dozens of suitcases, strollers and bags left behind.

Five children were among the dead, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the administration in the eastern region of Donetsk. Another 16 children were wounded, he said.

“They are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Mr. Zelensky wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is an evil that has no limits.”

Mr. Zelensky posted a video of a missile fragment lying on the ground near the station that had the words “for the children” painted on it. A person narrating the video identified it as the missile used in the attack.

“They clearly saw that they were hitting civilians early in the morning, that at the station at this time there were thousands of people trying to evacuate, families, children, elderly,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, wrote on his Facebook page.

Russia denied the strike but said it had been targeting train stations in the nearby Donbas towns and cities of Pokrovsk, Slovyansk and Barvinkove to destroy Ukrainian military hardware arriving into the region. Ukrainian officials have blamed Russia for thwarting evacuation attempts across the country, including outside the southern Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk, with artillery attacks.

The strikes herald a news focus on eastern Ukraine following Moscow’s decision to give up on capturing the capital, Kyiv. Ukraine, which has asked for heavier weapons in the face of a possibly more consolidated attack by the Russians, received a Soviet-era S-300 air-defense system from Slovakia, the Slovak government said Friday.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is scheduled to meet Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv on Friday, condemned the attack, calling it despicable.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said she was appalled by the strike. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime,” she wrote on Twitter. “We will hold Russia and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to account.”

Humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said the station attack was imperiling the evacuation efforts in the region.

“We were there yesterday, and we saw hundreds of people crowding the station, trying to leave,” said Christopher Stokes, emergency coordinator at Doctors Without Borders. “The hospitals had been urgently calling us to evacuate their patients by train. It is a big question whether we will be able to evacuate more people.”

Murat Sahin, the Ukraine representative at Unicef, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, condemned the harming of children in the attack.

“Civilians, particularly children, must be protected from harm,” Mr. Sahin said. “The killing of children must stop now.”

Kramatorsk, a city of more than 100,000, has been the base for Ukraine’s joint-forces operation, which has been fighting Russian-controlled separatists that took over swaths of Ukraine’s industrial east in 2014. The city and those around it that suffered through the separatist conflict are once again becoming a war zone now that Moscow aborted its multipronged effort to capture Kyiv. Russia has said it is in the second phase of what it calls a special military operation and that the conflict is going according to plan, but analysts say Russia is being forced to reconsider its capabilities after weeks of setbacks.

The Kremlin said Friday that the military operation could end in the “foreseeable future” since its goals were being achieved and negotiations between the two sides were under way.

Renewed fighting in the east will draw more of Kyiv’s resources away from cities and towns near the capital, where Ukrainian authorities are still trying to assess the extent of damage left after Russian troops withdrew. Ukrainian authorities on Friday were sifting through the remains of apartment blocks in the town of Borodyanka, north of the capital, after Kyiv said Russian planes bombed civilian targets, killing dozens and trapping countless more under the rubble.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Russian forces attacked at least two apartment buildings with bombs and rockets to cause maximum civilian deaths. She said 26 bodies had been recovered but that there could be many more.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians in its military assault on Ukraine and has called the video and photographic images of Russia’s alleged targeting of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere staged...