Girl, 12, in trainers died alone in Ukraine rail station massacre

A Russian ballistic missile believed to be carrying cluster munitions tore through a crowd of civilians fleeing the violence in Donbas.

Ukrainian police inspect the remains of the Tochka-U rocket with the words ‘for our children’ in Russian at the train station in Kramatorsk. Picture: AFP

The girl lay on a metal trolley, her face turned to the side, eyes closed, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a shiny blue coat and black trousers. Her feet, in white trainers, with the laces neatly done up, stuck out of the sheet that half-covered her, here at the end of her life in a bone-cold mortuary in eastern Ukraine.

She was 12 and had been killed nine hours earlier on Friday by a Russian ballistic missile believed to be carrying cluster munitions that tore through a crowd of more than a thousand civilians, most of them older people, women and children, at Kramatorsk railway station as they tried to board trains heading west.

They had flocked there from towns and villages around the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, amid calls from officials to evacuate ahead of an expected Russian offensive. The trains, they had hoped, would take them to safety.

Instead, they were slaughtered where they stood, bags in their hands, tickets at the ready. Officials said 52 people were killed, five of them children, among them the girl. No one at the hospital knew where her family was.

“She was alive when she came in,” said Valentina Sukhonos, a nurse at the hospital, as she stood looking down on her. “She came with a woman, I don’t know if it was her mother.”

Gently, four volunteers lifted the girl into a black plastic body bag and zipped her inside it. They carried her to a van and laid her down with the bodies of seven others who had also died at the hospital. They were the third load of the day.

“Putin is a killer,” one of the volunteers said, his face chalk-white with shock, gloved hands smeared with blood.

At the railway station on Friday, an act Ukrainian officials decried as Russia’s latest atrocity was laid bare: on a patch of grass lay part of a Tochka-U ballistic missile, about 2m long, twisted and broken at one end. On the side, someone had daubed “For the children” in white paint, a perverse inversion of reality that seemed to paint the attack as revenge for the imagined deaths of children at Ukrainian hands.

Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said the missile had carried cluster sub-munitions, which are designed to kill and maim indiscriminately over a large area and the use of which has been widely condemned. Witnesses I spoke to reported hearing several explosions all around them. The lack of a single big impact site and the fact that civilians were killed at a number of different spots around the station also appear to indicate the use of cluster munitions.

Bodies are cleared from the train station in Kramatorsk on Friday. Picture: AFP

As the warhead detonated, spraying shrapnel across the concourse, it took a horrific toll. Thirty-nine people were killed at the station; another 13 died in hospital.

It is unclear whether the long-range missile was fired from inside Russia or from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, which is run by pro-Russian separatists.

Stanislav Zagursky, the local police chief, showed me a photograph, taken moments after the blast, of a boy in jeans and a blue coat lying on his back on one of the green-painted benches dotted around the station, his feet tucked up next to him. His head had been blown off.

“The boy was eight years old,” Zagursky said, stopping in front of one of the benches. There was a small bloodstain on the right side of the seat. “He died here.”

Zagursky had arrived at the station seven minutes after the attack, and helped take the injured to hospital. Cluster munitions dropped from the missile had, he said, turned an area the size of several tennis courts, thronged with civilians, into a killing zone. To the right side of the station, where a small group of volunteers had set up a tent to help people find their trains, the ground was smeared with blood.

The bodies were not even cold by the time the Kremlin’s disinformation machine kicked into action. Moments after the attack, a pro-Russia separatist channel claimed Russian forces had launched a strike on what they said were Ukrainian military targets at the train station. The post was deleted after the extent of the civilian casualties became clear.

Then the Russian Defence Ministry claimed Russia did not possess Tochka-U rockets, despite the fact they had been paraded in training exercises in the months before the war. By that evening they had resorted to spouting absurd claims the Ukrainians had bombed their own people from a nearby town. But no amount of lies can hide what happened here. There were hundreds of witnesses, dozens of bodies.

The Russians knew there were civilians at the station. For days photos and videos had been shared online showing people desperately trying to make their way on to packed trains heading west to relative safety. Thousands had already fled.

Many had waited to the last moment, enduring five weeks of war, unwilling to abandon their homes. But when local officials called for civilians to evacuate Donbas – part of which has been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014 – they listened. They believed a Russian offensive was about to begin, and were hoping to escape the horrors – murder, torture, rape – uncovered in places such as Bucha after Russia’s retreat.

Instead they were attacked. In a Kramatorsk hospital, Alla Lukianova, who works in logistics, sat on her hospital bed wincing in pain, one shoulder covered in a sheet. She had stepped out of the station to get some water, leaving her mother, Viktoria, and daughter, Valeria, 17, inside. When the missile detonated, shrapnel ripped into the back of her jacket, soaking her clothes in blood. Her family were unhurt. “We were just trying to leave,” said Lukianova, 37.

The Sunday Times