Russia Strikes Train Station Kills 14 Passengers

 

 By Cassandra Vinograd

New York Times

 

At least 14 people were killed and more than a dozen wounded when a Russian drone slammed into a train platform in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday morning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the strike hit a platform at Dnipro station where two trains were waiting. In a post on social media, he shared images of bodies on the platform and emergency workers at the scene. The regional military administration said an additional 13 people were hospitalized with injuries, including six in serious condition.

Ukraine’s railway operator said that an air-raid alarm had sounded but that people were still on the platform where Train No. 866 from Dnipro to Zaporizhzhia was standing when a jet-powered drone hit.

The new breed of jet-powered drones has proved much harder for Ukraine’s already stretched air defenses to intercept. Ukraine’s air force said the drone that struck the platform was one of four that Russia had launched in the area around 11 a.m. The other three, it said in a statement, were shot down. 

Trains have long been a critical part of Ukraine’s logistics during the war. With airports closed, they move people and goods around the country and into other parts of Europe. But in recent months, Russia has scaled up its attacks on Ukraine’s rail infrastructure as part of a broader campaign to disrupt logistics, one that has also targeted gas stations and retail warehouses.

Air-raid alarms now regularly disrupt the routes, forcing passenger evacuations, often at night, and hourslong delays. Russian attacks have damaged or destroyed over 500 trains since the war began, a Ukrainian official said in September.

Thursday’s deadly strike was a grim reminder that despite a rare local cease-fire around the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky, to allow for aid delivery and evacuation, communities around Ukraine and along the 600-mile front line remained under Russian fire.

At least two people were killed — a pair of 15-year-old girls — and four others were injured in a separate attack in Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian authorities. A strike in the central city of Kremenchuk also killed three people.

Mr. Zelensky noted that at least 56 people, including 10 children, had also been wounded in those three attacks, which he called “deliberate strikes against civilians, brazen in their cruelty. 

“The Russians are carrying them out right as the humanitarian operation in Oleshky is unfolding,” he wrote on social media. “Russia’s signals are clear — they want the war to continue, and everyone around the world must still work very hard to achieve major de-escalation through strong steps and appropriate pressure on the aggressor.”

Russia’s defense ministry said that, in total, it shot down more than 1,200 drones overnight across Russia.

More than 600 of those drones had targeted Moscow and the surrounding area in what Russian state media said was one of the largest overnight Ukrainian assaults this year.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, called the timing of the assault — at a moment when Moscow was hosting a large summit with African leaders — “very strange” and said it underscored the need for Russia to continue fighting in Ukraine.