164 bodies have been found in Bucha, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor said

Ukrainian servicemen stand next to fragments of a rocket in front of the railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Friday, April 8. (Andriy Andriyenko / AP)

The initial assessment by the United States is that the missile that hit the Kramatorsk station was a short-range ballistic missile fired from a Russian position in Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said on Friday.

According to another senior US defense official, the United States “fully expects” that the attack on Kramatorsk station in Ukraine was a Russian strike with a short-range ballistic missile SS-21.

The official said that although the United States did not have “perfect visibility of Russia’s targeting process,” the station is a major railway hub, located “just on the edge of the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the Donbass region.”

Earlier on Friday, Ukraine accused Russian forces of using indiscriminate cluster munitions in Friday’s attack, which killed at least 50 people.

Pavlo Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk Oblast military administration, said a Russian Point-U missile full of small bombs had struck civilians evacuating the area.

Russian forces have been accused of regularly using cluster munitions against civilian targets in Ukraine. Last week, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it had received credible allegations that the Russian armed forces had used cluster munitions in populated areas at least 24 times.

Such attacks “could be war crimes,” UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet told the UN human rights council in Geneva.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also confirmed that Russia was using cluster munitions, including at least three cases in the southern Ukrainian city of Nikolaev on March 7, 11 and 13, 2022.

Cluster munitions pose a clear threat to civilians by randomly dispersing submunitions or bombs over a wide area. Bombles that fail to explode on impact often turn into de facto landmines, increasing post-conflict damage.

In 2008, more than 100 countries at the United Nations signed a ban on cluster munitions, according to the UN website. Ukraine and Russia have not signed the agreement.