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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy says about 30 people have been killed and 100 injured in a rocket strike on a railway station in the east of the country.
Writing on social media platforms, Mr Zelenskiy said thousands of people were at the station in Kramatorsk at the time of the strike.
Kramatorsk is a city in part of the Donetsk region controlled by the Ukrainian government, and the station was being used to evacuate civilians.
The strike came after Ukrainian leaders predicted more gruesome discoveries would be made in reclaimed cities and towns as Russian soldiers retreat to focus on eastern Ukraine.
Mr Zelenskiy accompanied a social media post with photos that showed a train carriage with smashed windows, abandoned luggage and bodies lying in what looked like an outdoor waiting area.
“The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” he said. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”
Russia did not immediately comment on the reports of the attack and the casualty toll. Moscow has denied targeting civilians since invading Ukraine on February 24th.
Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk claimed Ukrainian forces were responsible for the strike.
After failing to take Ukraine’s capital, the Kremlin has shifted its focus to the Donbass, a mostly Russian-speaking industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some areas.
Ukrainian officials warned residents this week to leave as soon as possible for safer parts of the country and said they and Russia had agreed to establish multiple evacuation routes in the east.
Meanwhile, Mr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that the situation in the town of Borodyanka was “significantly more dreadful” than in nearby Bucha, where Russian forces’ suspected killings of civilians have been broadly condemned.
Local officials have said more than 300 people were killed by Russian forces in Bucha, 35km northwest of the capital Kyiv, and around 50 of them were executed.
Moscow says images of bodies in Bucha were staged by the Ukrainian government to justify more sanctions against Russia and derail peace negotiations.
Russia has given the most sombre assessment so far of its invasion of Ukraine, describing the “tragedy” of mounting troop losses and the economic hit from sanctions, as Ukrainians were evacuated from eastern cities before an anticipated major offensive.
Russia’s six-week long incursion has seen more than 4 million people flee abroad, killed or injured thousands, turned cities into rubble and led to sweeping sanctions on its leaders and companies.
Humanitarian crisis
In a symbolic move, the UN General Assembly suspended Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, expressing “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis”. Russia then quit the council.
Russia has previously acknowledged its attack has not progressed as quickly as it wanted, but on Thursday Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lamented the rising death toll.
“We have significant losses of troops,” he told Sky News. “It’s a huge tragedy for us.”
Ukraine’s military general staff said on Friday that Russian forces were focused on capturing the besieged southern port of Mariupol, fighting near the eastern city of Izyum and breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces near Donetsk.
Ukraine said it aimed to establish up to 10 humanitarian corridors on Friday, but civilians trying to flee Mariupol will have to use private vehicles.
Russia is facing its most difficult economic situation for three decades due to unprecedented Western sanctions, prime minister Mikhail Mishustin said. The US Congress removed its “most favoured nation” trade status in a further blow.
Russia says it launched what it calls a “special military operation” on February 24th to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western allies reject that as a false pretext.
Following new restrictions after the killing of civilians in the town of Bucha that were widely condemned by the West as war crimes, Ukraine called on allies to stop buying Russian oil and gas, amid divisions in Europe, and to boost it militarily.
“Ukraine needs weapons which will give it the means to win on the battlefield and that will be the strongest possible sanction against Russia,” Mr Zelenskiy said in a video late on Thursday.
He also said the situation in Borodyanka, another town northwest of Kyiv retaken from Russian forces, is “significantly more dreadful” than in Bucha, without citing any evidence.
Video from Borodyanka showed search and rescue teams using heavy equipment to dig through the rubble of a building that collapsed. Hundreds of people were feared buried.
Sanctions
The EU’s ambassadors agreed a fifth sanctions package on Russia with a coal embargo containing a 120 day wind-down period to give member states time to find alternative suppliers, following pressure from Germany to delay the measure.
Ukraine accused Hungary of undermining EU unity after Budapest said it was prepared to pay roubles for Russian gas, a Kremlin demand that most in the West had resisted.
On the battlefield, Ukraine says after withdrawing from Kyiv’s outskirts, Russia is regrouping to try to gain full control of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which have been partly held by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
The besieged southern port of Mariupol, where the mayor said over 100,000 people were still trapped, was also a target.
“Evacuate! The chances of saving yourself and your family from Russian death are dwindling every day,” Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said.
Authorities in Dnipro, a city in central-eastern Ukraine, also urged women, children and the elderly to leave.
British military intelligence said Russian forces were shelling cities in the east and south and had advanced further south from the city of Izium, which is under their control. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
Both sides have traded accusations of abuse, with Moscow opening a criminal investigation into a Russian soldier’s allegations that he was beaten and threatened with death while being held in Ukraine as a prisoner of war.
Separately, a social media video verified by Reuters and geolocated to an area west of Kyiv appears to show Ukrainian forces shooting and killing a captured and badly wounded Russian soldier.
Support
Nato members agreed to strengthen support to Ukraine on Thursday.
Ukraine has received about 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons systems from the United States and its allies, the top US general said, and Washington is looking into what new support it could send.
Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov made a plea for heavier, more modern weapons as Russia concentrated its forces for a major attack.
Russia has “drawn conclusions and changed tactics” and is now focusing on long-range strikes from the air, he said in a video address.
As a result, Ukraine needs air defence systems, long-range artillery, tanks and anti-ship missiles, Reznikov said.
Mr Zelenskiy’s government says starving Russia’s war machine is the only way to bring it to a settlement at on-and-off peace talks.
On Thursday, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said a draft peace deal from Kyiv contained “unacceptable” elements and deviated from previously agreed proposals.
Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak told Reuters Mr Lavrov was not directly involved in negotiations and his statements were “of purely propagandistic significance” aimed at diverting attention from the killings in Bucha.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said in the Kyiv region, which includes Borodyanka, Bucha and other towns and villages such as Irpin, authorities had found 650 bodies, with 40 of them children.
Ukraine’s prosecutors said 169 children had been killed and 306 wounded in the invasion.
Bucha’s mayor has said dozens were the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by Russian troops. Reuters could not independently verify those figures.
Accounts by at least a dozen residents of one apartment complex in Bucha painted a picture of violence and intimidation by Russian soldiers. – Reuters