A MISSILE strike on a train station in the city of Kramatorsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region today killed at least 39 people.

Ukrainian officials said the transport hub was struck by a Russian missile, either an Iskander or Tochka U, and that over 100 others were injured.

Oleksandr Kamyshin, head of the railway company, called it “a deliberate attack on the passenger infrastructure of the railway and the residents of Kramatorsk.”

At least four children were said to be among the dead, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials. 

“This is just an ordinary railway terminal … just an ordinary town in the east of Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address to the Finnish parliament.

“This is how Russia came to protect the Donbass, how they view the protection of the Russian-speaking population. And this is the 44th day of our reality,” he added. 

President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen condemned the attack as “despicable.”

“I am appalled by the loss of life and I will offer personally my condolences to President Zelensky,” she said.  

Thousands were at the train station waiting to be evacuated as the missile struck this morning. 

“The ‘Rashists’ [Russian fascists] knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible,” governor of Donetsk Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

But the leader of the people’s militia of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic Eduard Basurin blamed Ukraine for the attack. 

The Kremlin said fragments of the Tochka-U missile found in the debris proved that Ukrainian forces were responsible.

The missile is a version of an older Soviet-era system that the Russian military stopped using in 2019.  

“All the claims by representatives of the Kiev nationalist regime that Russia allegedly carried out a ‘missile attack’ on April 8 against the railway terminal in Kramatorsk are a provocation and completely have nothing to do with reality,” a Russian defence ministry statement said. 

“On March 14, 2022, a battalion of the Ukrainian army’s 19th separate missile brigade delivered a strike by a similar Tochka-U missile against the centre of Donetsk, in which 17 people were killed and another 36 civilians were wounded,” it added.