Russian strike hits train station in Ukraine, killing one and injuring 30
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Smoke rising over a passenger train hit by a Russian drone strike in Shostka, in Ukraine's Sumy region, on Oct 4.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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- A Russian drone struck a passenger train in Shostka, Sumy region, injuring approximately 30 civilians.
- The train, en route to Kyiv, suffered damage to carriages, with windows blown out, and caught fire after the attack.
- President Zelensky condemned the attack as terrorism, highlighting Russia's increasing strikes on Ukraine's railway infrastructure.
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KYIV - 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 Oct 4, 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,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote 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 – the so-called ‘double tap’, when the second strike hits rescuers and people being evacuated,” he said, in a statement released by his ministry on social media.
Sumy region 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,” Mr Zelensky 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.
Drones hunt locomotives
In a video interview from a train en route to the strike site, the chief executive officer of Ukraine’s state rail company, Mr Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, told Reuters that the drones had targeted locomotives, also damaging 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 chief added that there was only civilian traffic at the station, and that he believed this was an attempt to make areas like Shostka, which is about 50km from the Russian border, unsafe for passenger traffic.
“They are doing everything to make front line 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.” REUTERS
