Two Russian drones struck trains at a station in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region, killing one person and injuring about 30 others, officials said on Saturday, with Ukraine’s foreign minister accusing Moscow of deliberately hitting passenger trains.
“A brutal Russian drone strike on the railway station in Shostka, Sumy region,” wrote the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Telegram, posting a video of a wrecked, burning passenger carriage and others with their windows blown out.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, accused Russia of deliberately conducting two strikes on passenger trains.
“This is one of the most brutal Russian tactics,” he said in a statement released by his ministry.
The Sumy region’s governor, Oleh Hryhorov, said eight people had been taken to hospital.
“The Russians could not have been unaware that they were targeting civilians. This is terrorism, which the world has no right to ignore,” Zelenskyy wrote.
Moscow has stepped up its airstrikes on Ukraine’s railway infrastructure, hitting it almost every day over the last two months.
Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians in its war in Ukraine, although many thousands have been killed by its military.
In a video interview from a train en route to the strike site, the CEO of Ukraine’s state rail company Oleksandr Pertsovskyi told Reuters the drones had targeted locomotives, but had also damaged the carriages attached to them.
“In essence, they are hunting for locomotives,” he said, adding that Russia was increasingly deploying this tactic.
He said the trains hit had been a local commuter service and another train headed to the capital, Kyiv.
The rail boss said there was only civilian traffic at the station. He said he believed this was an attempt to make areas like Shostka, about 50km (30 miles) from the Russian border, unsafe for passenger traffic.
“They are doing everything to make frontline and border areas uninhabitable, so that people are afraid to go there, afraid to board trains, afraid to gather at markets, and so that students are afraid to return home.”
