The attack on the train station in Kramatorsk came mid-morning, when hundreds were gathered, waiting for evacuation out of east Ukraine as they had done at the same time for the last several days.
Body parts, packed bags and stuffed animals were flung across the floor after two rockets struck the busy hub on Friday, killing at least 39 people.
“I was in the station. I heard like a double explosion. I rushed to the wall for protection,” said Natalia, searching for her passport among the abandoned belongings.
“I saw people covered in blood coming into the station and bodies everywhere on the ground. I don’t know if they were just injured or dead,” she told AFP.
Around 30 bodies, all dressed in civilian clothing, were grouped together and placed under plastic sheets next to a kiosk daubed yellow and blue — the colours of Ukraine’s flag — outside the station, where blood pooled on the ground.
On the station platform, a walking stick lay next to a lump of flesh. Further along, a toy rabbit soaked red.
The toll from the strikes rose throughout the morning with Ukraine’s SBU security service saying least 39 people had been killed, including at least four children.
Kramatorsk had been hit by Russian strikes earlier this week but had been otherwise spared the destruction witnessed by other eastern Ukraine cities since Russia’s invasion.
– ‘Looking for my husband’ –
Moscow denied involvement in Friday’s strike and accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack deliberately.
Ukrainian authorities had warned this week that time was running out to flee westwards in advance of an anticipated Russian attack.
Rescue workers and men in camouflage carried bodies onto a truck to be ferried away. Some of the bags were light and needed no more than two men to be carried.
Prosecutors in the Donetsk region said in a statement that at the time of the attack there were approximately 4,000 civilians at the station, mostly women and children.
Earlier in the morning, AFP saw dozens of people — women, children and the elderly — throng the station desperate to escape the feared Russian advance on eastern Ukraine.
After the attack, a sneaker with the foot still inside was visible under a bench, where the people hoping to be evacuated had been waiting.
A policeman moved between the debris, picking up phones and putting them in a box, one of them ringing out incessantly.
“I’m looking for my husband. He was here. I can’t reach him,” sobbed a woman in a red turtle neck. Shaking, she hesitated to get closer to the bodies, holding her phone to her ear.
– ‘For our children’ –
The head of Ukraine’s railway company, Alexander Kamyshin had said earlier that at least 100 were injured by two rockets hitting the station.
“This is a deliberate attack on the passenger infrastructure of the railway and the residents of Kramatorsk,” Kamyshin said.
A soldier at one of the three hospitals in the city told AFP that around 50 wounded had arrived from the scene.
“Many of them will die because they have lost a lot of blood, and we don’t have enough blood,” he said.
Outside the station, four burnt-out cars could be seen next to the military-green remains of a rocket, cordoned off.
“It’s a Tochka missile, a fragmentation bomb,” a policeman on the scene told AFP. “It explodes in several places over an area the size of a football pitch.”
The missile was tagged with white spray paint with the words “for our children” in Russian, a recurring expression used by pro-Russian separatists in reference to their losses since the start of the first Donbas war in 2014.
