Your Evening Briefing: Train Station Attack Brings More Civilian Carnage

Having spent more than a month of war destroying residential areas and cities across Ukraine, potentially killing thousands, and now the subject of global fury over the alleged mass execution of civilians, Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked a train station in the east filled with people trying to flee the conflict, local officials said. At least 50 of them were killed in the assault on Kramatorsk train station, reportedly with the use of cluster munitions. Such weapons are banned under international treaty given their capacity to maximize carnage.

Russia’s military has admitted to targeting Ukrainian rail stations (but denied responsibility for the bloodshed at Kramatorsk) as civilians seek passage west to avoid an expected assault on the Donbas region. Recognition is growing in Kyiv and allied capitals that the window to prevent Ukraine’s partition and a long war of attrition is narrowing. In Russia, Moscow isn’t informing many Russian families when its soldiers are killed and is using mobile crematoriums to burn some of their remains, ABC News reported. While the recent withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kyiv may represents a setback for Putin, to roll back or contain a new Russian advance in Donetsk and Luhansk would mean taking the fight to open battlefields, requiring more than just the anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles the U.S. and Europe have supplied so far.