Just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia deliberately attacked civilians at a train station in Kramatorsk, a message written in Russian language on a missile raised concerns about Moscow’s growing atrocities.
“For the children” – this is said to be the words written on a missile that hit the railway station in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donbas region, killing 50 people, including several kids, Newsweek reported. The missile was photographed on the ground in the aftermath of the attack with the inscription painted on its side.
The railway station was hit as crowds were “waiting for the first train” to be evacuated to safer regions. Residents have been trying to flee to the central and western Ukraine ahead of an expected massive Russian offensive in the east.
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According to Berlin-based Eastern Europe expert Sergej Sumlenny, the message appears to push Russian propaganda that Russian children of the Donbas region are “suffering under Ukrainian shelling.”
Some interpreted it as a message of revenge.
“One needs to add, although both ‘За детей’ and ‘Для детей’ can be translated as ‘For kids’, the latter means ‘to hit kids’, and the first is more ‘because (you have done smth [something] to ) kids’. The text is ‘За детей’, so it obviously played with the lie, Ukrainians killed Russian kids,” explained Sumlenny, according to Newsweek.
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“‘Russian Children of Donbas’ who are ‘suffering under Ukrainian shelling’ was a very popular Russian propaganda narrative since 8 years,” Sumlenny tweeted, sharing clips of articles from Russian state-run media outlets including the newspaper Izvestia, which he said include “identical sentences.”
However, it remains unclear who wrote the message in Russian lettering on the missile.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, tweeted that a Russian rocket included “cluster ammunition.”
“Thousands of civilians were waiting for evacuation there, dozens killed and injured,” he wrote. “Russians knew exactly whom they were targeting.”
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However, the Kremlin has denied that it targeted civilians.
“All statements by representatives of the Kyiv nationalist regime about the ‘rocket attack’ allegedly carried out by Russia on April 8 at the railway station in the city of Kramatorsk are a provocation and are absolutely untrue,” the Russian defense ministry said in statement on Friday.
“We emphasize that Tochka-U tactical missiles, fragments of which were found near the Kramatorsk railway station and published by eyewitnesses, are used only by the Ukrainian armed forces,” the ministry added.
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This is the second recent such incident of massacre in Ukraine, which Russia has denied of being party to.
The horrific act of war crime in Bucha, where bodies of hundreds of civilians were found scattered on the road, led to Russia’s suspension from the United Nations Human Rights Council.