Russian train station strike kills at least 25 people on Ukraine’s Independence Day

Russian missile attacks on the town of Chaplyne, Dnipropetrovsk region, killed more than two dozen people on Ukraine’s Independence Day, Ukrainian officials reported on Thursday, August 25.

Writing on Telegram, Ukrainian presidential aide Kyrylo Tymoshenko said that the strikes on Chaplyne hit a residential neighborhood and a train station, killing at least 25 people, including two children. “An 11-year-old boy died under the rubble of a building, another 6-year-old child died in a car fire near the railway station. 31 people were injured.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky broke the news about the train station attack on Wednesday, during a speech at the UN Security Council marking Ukraine’s Independence Day (August 24). “Four passenger cars caught fire…Rescuers are working. But unfortunately, the number of dead may still increase. This is how we live every day. This is how Russia prepared for this meeting of the UN Security Council,” Zelensky said via video link.

The Ukrainian authorities did not report the missile strike on the train station prior to Zelensky’s speech. The attack on the residential area was reported earlier in the day. Tymoshenko said on Thursday that rescue operations have been completed.

Russia admitted to carrying out the attack, but claimed to have struck a military train that was destined for the combat zone in the Donbas. “As a result of a direct strike by an Iskander missile on a military train at the Chaplyne railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk region, over 200 servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reserve and 10 units of military equipment were destroyed,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Meduza cannot immediately verify this claim.

The death toll from Wednesday’s attack on Chaplyne makes it one of the most deadly strikes since Moscow began its full-blown invasion of Ukraine in late February. In April, a Russian missile attack on a train station in Kramatorsk killed 61 people and injured 121 others.

So far, there are only a few publicly available images of the damage from the strike. The Ukrainian authorities had not released any photos at the time of this writing. Ukrainian officials also have yet to confirm how many of the victims were civilians.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the attack on Wednesday, saying it “fits a pattern of atrocities” Russia has committed in Ukraine. That evening, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that Russia “will answer for everything.”

Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych also promised that Ukraine would respond to the attack in the coming days. “The situation [at] the beginning of the war, when 100–150 rockets were dumped on our heads every day, civilians were killed, and we couldn’t respond (well, only with short-range weapons) has long passed. We can already reach Crimea and whatever you [sic] want,” he said in an interview.

Ahead of the August 24 holiday, U.S. intelligence warned that Russia planned to launch strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and government facilities on Independence Day. Large-scale Independence Day events were banned in Kyiv and the American Embassy urged U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine. According to the Telegram channel Air Raid Map, air raid alerts were issued for Ukraine’s regions 189 times on Independence Day, setting an “absolute record” since the start of the full-scale war.