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The White House said Friday that the administration of President Joe Biden will support investigations into the attack on a train station in Ukraine, which authorities said was packed with women, children and elderly refugees.
The White House has previously called the footage from the train station “horrible and sad.”
The United States will continue to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said in an interview with CNN.
At least 50 people were killed and dozens injured in a rocket attack on a train station in eastern Ukraine, packed with women, children and the elderly trying to flee the war, Ukrainian authorities said. Among the victims, 5 were children.
Officials said many of the injured had lost limbs and were undergoing surgery after the attack in the town of Kramatorsk.
Thousands of people were at the train station when the rocket hit.
The United States believes Russia used a short-range ballistic missile for the attack, a senior U.S. defense official said. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said the Pentagon believes Russian forces used an SS-21 Scarab missile, but that the motive for the attack was unclear.
SS-21 is the name used by the NATO military alliance for a type of missile known as the Tochka in the former Soviet states.
The United States is still analyzing the attack and it is not clear if cluster munitions were used, the US official said.
“We do not believe the Russians deny responsibility,” the official said. The Russian Defense Ministry was quoted by the RIA news agency as saying that the missiles that allegedly hit the station were used only by the Ukrainian army and that Kramatosrski was not a target of the Russian armed forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the attack on civilians was deliberate and blamed Russia for the loss of lives.
“Inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. “Without the strength or courage to face us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” the president said on social media.
“This is a limitless evil,” he said. And if he is not punished, then he will never be stopped. “
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace condemned the attack.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said about 4,000 civilians were inside and around the station, most of them women and children, who were responding to calls to leave the area before Russian forces arrived.
“People were just leaving for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said during a visit to Buca, where journalists and residents returning after the departure of Russian forces found the bodies of the dead on the streets and in mass graves.
Mrs. Venediktova spoke as workers exhumed corpses from a mass grave near a church.
None of the dead were Russian, she said. The Prosecutor General’s Office is investigating the deaths as possible war crimes./VOA
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