At least five people were killed and two were injured after a Russian drone strike on a cross-country passenger train they were riding in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, authorities said.
The Kharkiv prosecutor’s office said late Tuesday that Russian forces targeted the train with three Shahed-type attack drones, one of which struck a passenger car and the locomotive, setting them ablaze, while two others detonated nearby.
The attack occurred near Barvinkove near the border with Donetsk province as the train was nearing the end of an 830-mile journey from Chop in Ukraine’s far southwest on the Slovakia/Hungary border, via Lviv, according to Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov and Ukrainian Railways.
The prosecutor’s office attributed the attack to the “Ossetian Army,” but it was unclear if it was referring to Russian Federation forces stationed in South Ossetia that were redeployed to the region at the start of the war, or South Ossetia militias who have been fighting on the side of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas since 2014.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack, saying there was absolutely no justification, militarily, for attacking civilians.
“In any country, a drone strike on a civilian train would be considered in exactly the same way — purely as terrorism. There would be no doubt about the classification, neither in Europe, nor in America, nor in the Arab world, nor in China, nor anywhere else. There is, and can be, no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage,” Zelensky wrote on X.
The attack came amid a large-scale overnight assault involving at least one ballistic missile and more than 140 drones against targets in Kryvyi Rih, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa and killing at least two people and injuring four others, in the Kyiv region.
The fatalities, a woman and a man, in Bilohorodka, just outside Kyiv, occurred when a drone hit an apartment building, setting it on fire
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Marian Kushnir, a resident in the building, told Ukrainian Pravda that he pulled the four-year-old daughter of the woman who was killed from their burning apartment but was unable to rescue the mother and her partner. (UPI)
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