The head of a global food charity working in Ukraine has told CGTN Europe about the moment a rocket struck a packed train station in Kramatorsk.
Kyiv said as many as 50 people, including five children, were killed, with many more wounded - some losing limbs - in the attack at a railway station filled with civilians fleeing the threat of a major Russian offensive in the country's east.
"There were many casualties. There were remnants of a rocket or potentially an unexploded rocket out in the parking lot," said Nathan Mook, the World Central Kitchen charity CEO.
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"Cars had just been on fire. The fire department had put them out. Ambulances were taking away the injured, and there was tremendous damage to windows, shattered all over. It was just a brutal, brutal scene," he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy branded the strike a deliberate attack on civilians. Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said the station was hit by a Tochka U short-range ballistic missile that contained cluster munitions, which explode in mid-air, spraying small lethal bomblets over a wider area.
"They wanted to sow panic and fear. They wanted to take as many civilians as possible," he said.
People's belongings and bloodstains on the ground after a missile strike on a railway station in Kramatorsk. /Ukraine Ministry of Defense/Reuters
Mook, who has been working with colleagues in the area in recent days making food deliveries, said the station often contains "thousands of people at any one point, probably upwards of 3,000 to 4,000, many women and children, grandparents, people with disabilities…the train station is packed. There are people in strollers....families."
The Kremlin denied that Russia was involved in the attack.
Speaking to reporters on a conference call, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Russian armed forces had no missions scheduled for Kramatorsk on Friday.
The Russian defense ministry said the missile was of a type used only by the Ukrainian military and similar to one that hit the center of the city of Donetsk on March 14, killing 17 people, the RIA news agency reported.