The Russian missile attacks on the train station in the village of Chaplyne, in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast on Wednesday, killed 25 people, including two boys aged six and 11, while further 31 people were wounded, the Kyiv Independent reports.
The attacks have caused a fire that has caught four trains and five of the victims of the attack burnt to death in a vehicle, while the last three bodies were retrieved from the rubble as rescue operations in the town ended, Ukrainian presidential aide and the deputy head of the president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said on Thursday on Telegram.
The attack has made somber Ukraine’s Independence Day, which on Wednesday marked the 31st anniversary of the break with the Soviet Union.
According to the information that Ukraine’s Air Forces spokesperson Yuriy Ignat provided, eight Kh-22 cruise missiles hit targets across Ukraine on Aug. 24, Russian jets made over 200 sorties, often simulating strikes, and air raid alarms went off about 190 times in all of Ukraine’s regions.
Russia’s defense ministry, on the other side, claimed that in the railway station attack in central Ukraine it had killed Ukrainian troops.
The ministry said in its daily briefing that more than 200 Ukraine’s Armed Forces servicemen of the reserve and 10 units of military equipment traveling on a military train at the Chaplyne railway station to the combat zone in Donbas were destroyed as a result of a direct hit by an Iskander missile.
In one of the heaviest losses for Ukraine’s air force in recent weeks, Moscow also destroyed eight Ukrainian fighter planes in raids against airbases in Ukraine’s Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Responding to the latest rocket terror attack he had strongly condemned as heinous, EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell stressed that Russia will be held accountable for a rocket terror.