Death Toll In Russian Missile Attack On Ukrainian Train Station Rises To 25

The death toll from a Russian rocket attack as Ukraine observed its Independence Day has risen to 25, including an 11-year-old boy found under the rubble of a house and a 6-year-old killed in a car fire near a targeted train station, a Ukrainian official said Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022, Inna Varenytsia reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say if the 25 victims he reported from Wednesday’s attack were all civilians. A total of 31 people sustained injuries, he said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces used an Iskander missile to strike a military train that was carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment to the front line in eastern Ukraine.

The ministry claimed more than 200 reservists “were destroyed on their way to the combat zone.” The deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say if the 25 victims he reported from Wednesday’s attack were all civilians. A total of 31 people sustained injuries, he said.

The lethal strike in Chaplyne, a town of about 3,500 residents in the central Dnipropetrovsk region served as a brutally painful reminder that Russia’s military force is causing civilians to suffer and testing Ukraine’s resilience after six months of a grinding war.

The Russian government has repeatedly claimed following attacks in which civilians died that its forces only aimed at legitimate military targets. Hours before the train station attack, Russia insisted it was doing its best to spare civilians, even at a cost of slowing down its offensive in Ukraine.

In Geneva on Thursday, the UN’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, decried the time since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into the neighboring country as “unimaginably horrifying.” She called on Putin “to halt armed attacks against Ukraine.”

The train station strike took place after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Moscow might attempt “something particularly cruel” this week as Ukraine marked both its 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union and the six-month point of Russia’s invasion on Wednesday.

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