KYIV, Ukraine (Dispatches) -- A missile hit a train station where thousands of people had flocked to flee in eastern Ukraine, killing 50 people Friday, Ukrainian authorities said.
About 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said, adding that most were women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russia launches a full-scale offensive in the country’s east.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied attacking the station in Kramatorsk, a city in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region, but President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders accused Russia’s military of deliberately targeting a location where only civilians were assembled.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, which lies in the Donbas, said that 50 people were killed, including five children, and many dozens more were wounded.
“The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves.
Russia has shifted its focus to the Donbas, 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. The train station is located in government-controlled territory.
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.
The United Nations estimates that more than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began and that more than 12 million people are stranded in areas under attack.
Elsewhere in the Donbas, the governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, said Russia was concentrating equipment and troops and increasing shelling and bombing to aid their advance.
In his nightly video address, Zelensky said horrors worse than the ones in Bucha already had surfaced in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital.
The prosecutor general also expressed concern about the death toll in Borodyanka, where the process of retrieving bodies from shelled and collapsed buildings has just begun. Twenty-six bodies were found Thursday from the ruins of just two buildings.
Some 700 people have been killed in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, including both military and civilians, since the start of Russia’s operation in February, its mayor said.
“I can give you an approximate figure - 700 people. This includes military and civilians,” Vladyslav Atroshenko said, adding that two-thirds of the pre-war population of 300,000 people had fled.
Despite calls for peace, NATO nations agreed to increase their supply of arms after Ukraine’s foreign minister pleaded for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help face down an expected offensive in the east.
Two top European Union officials and the prime minister of Slovakia traveled to Kyiv on Friday, looking to shore up the EU’s support for Ukraine. Prime Minister Eduard Heger said he, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell brought trade and humanitarian aid proposals for Zelensky and his government.
Heger also announced that his country has donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine. Later, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said the U.S. would deploy a Patriot air defense system to Slovakia for as long as needed, a precondition for Ukraine to get the S-300 long-range air missile system.
Zelensky had mentioned the S-300s

by name when he spoke to U.S. lawmakers by video in March, appealing for anti-air systems that would allow Ukraine to “close the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
Western nations have stepped up sanctions against Russia. A day after the United States imposed sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, the European Union and Britain followed suit Friday.
The EU has so far frozen nearly 30 billion euros in assets from blacklisted Russian and Belarusian individuals and companies under sanctions imposed for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, it said Friday.
A total of 29.5 billion euros ($32 billion) “including assets such as boats, helicopters, real estate and artwork” have been seized and another 196 billion euros of transactions have been blocked, the European Commission said in a statement.
Japan said it will expel eight Russian diplomats and officials. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced new sanctions on Russia, including a coal ban.
Montenegro also ordered the expulsion of four Russian diplomats, the foreign ministry said, citing “violation of diplomatic norms.”
Moscow is expelling 45 Polish diplomats, Russia’s foreign ministry said Friday, in a tit-for-tat move after Warsaw last month expelled the same number of Russian diplomats for espionage.
The ministry said it summoned the Polish ambassador in Moscow to “strongly protest against the unjustified” expulsion of Russian diplomats from Poland on March 23.
European Union countries agreed to impose a coal embargo on Russia as part of the fifth round of sanctions against the country over its military operation in Ukraine.
It includes a 10 billion euro ($10.9 billion) ban on exports to Russia, including high-tech goods, freezing of several Russian banks’ assets, and the closure of EU ports to Russian-flagged ships.
It also encompasses sanctions against Russian energy with a coal embargo estimated to be worth €4 billion per year. EU countries, heavily dependent on Russian energy, had so far been unsure about going ahead with an energy embargo.
In addition to sanctions, the EU also backed a proposal to boost its funding of arms supplies to Ukraine by 500 million Euros, taking it to a total of 1.5 billion Euros.
Ukraine has received about 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons systems from the United States and its allies, the top U.S. general said, and Washington is looking into what new support it could send.
Earlier this week, the U.S. government rolled out fresh sanctions on Russian officials and entities, amid rapidly worsening relations between the two countries.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin accused the German government of half-hearted support for Kyiv and said his country had become a victim of Germany’s “shameful” energy dependence on Russia.
“It’s not just Russian gas, it’s oil, coal, metals, diamonds and other raw materials. We (Ukraine) have become the biggest victim of this perverted relationship. Ukrainians are paying for this failed German policy with their lives,” Reuters quoted Andrij Melnyk as saying Friday.
His comments underscore a growing frustration in Kiev with the government of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has dragged its heels where experts believe it most counts - an energy embargo.
“This kind of hypocrisy with Russia dates back to Nord Stream 1 (gas pipeline),” said Melnyk. “Germany’s huge dependence on Russia, at a time of the worst aggression since the Second World War, is shameful.”
After the German government put its highly contested new gas pipeline from Russia, Nord Stream 2, on hold after the invasion, there have been calls, unheeded in Berlin, to shut down Nord Stream 1, which has funneled Russian gas to Germany since 2011.
This week, the European Union agreed further sanctions on Russia, including a coal embargo, but that measure was watered down by Germany.