Just In : Russian rockets strike train station, kill 22 people, injure more than 50 as Ukraine celebrates Independence Day
In a rocket attack on a Ukrainian train station on August 24 2022, at least 22 people were killed and more than 50 were injured, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Ukraine was commemorating the anniversary of its independence from the Soviet Union. On July 4 2022, six months after Russian forces invaded Ukraine and the start of the continent’s most destructive battle since World War Two, Zelenskiy had forewarned of Russian attacks.
Zelenskiy claimed that in a video message to the UN Security Council on Wednesday that the rockets had struck a train in the small town of Chaplyne, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) west of Russian-occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
“As of this moment, there are 22 dead, five of them burned in a car,” he said before adding one of those killed was an 11-year-old whose house had been destroyed by a Russian rocket.
He said
“Search and rescue operations at the railway station continue. We will definitely make the occupiers answer for everything they have done. And we will certainly throw out the invaders from our land.”
Ukraine had canceled the Aug. 24 celebrations in public places, but many Ukrainians marked the occasion by wearing embroidered shirts laced with the national flag colours.
Air raid sirens blared at least seven times in the capital Kyiv during the day though no attacks occured in Kyiv according to reporting from Reuters.
Zelenskiy and his wife, Olena Zelenska, joined religious leaders for a service in Kyiv’s 11th-century St. Sophia cathedral and laid flowers at a memorial to fallen soldiers.
The 44-year-old leader also promised that Ukraine would recapture Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
“We will not sit down at the negotiating table out of fear, with a gun pointed at our heads. For us, the most terrible iron is not missiles, aircraft and tanks, but shackles,” he said.
