Pavlo Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk regional military administration where the attack took place, said 98 wounded – 16 children, 46 women and 36 men – had been taken to local hospitals.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said earlier that nearly 300 people were injured in the strike.
Addressing the Finnish parliament on Friday, Zelensky said “the Russian military has hit the railway terminal”, adding: “There are witnesses, there are videos, there are remains of rockets and dead people.”
He said “people (were) crowded waiting for the trains to be evacuated to the safe area” at the station. “Why do they need to hit civilians with missiles? Why this cruelty that the world is witnessing in Bucha and other cities liberated by the Ukrainian army? ”Zelensky asked the deputies.
Local police said in a statement that the rockets had hit a temporary waiting room where “hundreds of people are waiting for the evacuation train”.
“This is another proof that Russia is brutally, barbarically killing Ukrainian civilians, with only one goal – to kill,” said a statement from the mayor of Kramatorsk.
The mayor said that in the last two weeks, about 8,000 people a day go to the evacuation station. About 4,000 people were there when the rocket hit.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the attack a “deliberate massacre.”
“The Russians knew that the Kramatorsk train station was full of civilians waiting to be evacuated,” he said.
Russia’s defense ministry issued a statement Friday calling the missile strike a “provocation” in a statement reflecting recent denials of the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Kiev suburb of Bucha.
“All statements by representatives of the Kiev nationalist regime about the alleged” missile attack “by Russia on April 8 at the Kramatorsk station are a provocation and absolutely do not correspond to reality,” the statement said.
“On April 8, the Russian armed forces did not conduct or plan artillery shelling in the city of Kramatorsk. We emphasize that the “Point-U” tactical missiles, the remains of which were found near the Kramatorsk railway station and published by eyewitnesses, were used only by the Ukrainian armed forces. “
Ukrainian forces have the Soviet-designed Tochka missile in their inventory, but it has also been used by Russian and separatist forces in the past.
Russian military and senior officials have strongly denied attacks on civilians, most recently claiming – without evidence – that the massacre of civilians in Bucha was staged. The killings of civilians during the Russian occupation of the city have been documented in detail.
The eastern city of Kramatorsk was one of the first targets for the Russian military when the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. Ihnatchenko said Ukrainians have used the station since late February to evacuate the region.
“The Russians knew that thousands of people were there (at the station) every day,” she said.
Two rockets hit the station, according to the head of Ukraine’s national railway system Alexander Kamishin. Pavlo Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk regional military administration, said the Russian military had used Iskander short-range ballistic missiles.
CNN chief international presenter Christian Amanpur said the attack was reminiscent of an attack on a market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, where “ordinary civilians were killed while just doing their jobs”.
Amanpur said such attacks on civilians tended to solidify the West’s determination and could force the European Union to impose even more sanctions on Russia. Brussels has already approved five rounds of sanctions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine.
EU senior diplomat Josep Borrell condemned the “indiscriminate attack”, while EU President Charles Michel called it “horrific”.
“This is another attempt to close the escape routes for those fleeing this unjustified war and to cause human suffering,” Borel said.
Borrell and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are due to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky this week in Kyiv.
The attack comes as Russian forces prepare for a large-scale operation in eastern Ukraine to seize the disputed Donbass region, Ukrainian officials say.
Donbass is home to the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, two separatist enclaves that Russian President Vladimir Putin declared independent shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine.
For almost eight years, the two regions have been the site of a low-intensity war between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces. More than 14,000 people have died in the fighting, and Kyiv is now preparing for more casualties.
Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said the “battle for Donbass” was already under way. He said the fighting there would be reminiscent of the devastating battles of World War II, as Moscow’s offensive could include “thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, planes, artillery”.
British intelligence estimates that Russian troops have “completely withdrawn” from northern Ukraine to Belarus and Russia, and many of them could be transferred to eastern Ukraine to fight in Donbass. The Ukrainian military also says it has seen an accumulation of Russian forces in the east.
Joshua Berlinger of CNN, Julia Presnyakova, Ivan Watson and Christina Bondarenko contributed to this report
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