Kramatorsk Mayor: All residents will be urgently evacuated using cars and other vehicles – drivers sought
Denys Karlovskyi – Friday, 8 April 2022, 17:00
Oleksandr Honcharenko, Mayor of Kramatorsk, announced that all residents of Kramatorsk will be urgently evacuated from the railway station using cars and other vehicles.
Source: Oleksandr Honcharenko in a Ukraine Media Center briefing; Ukrzaliznytsia [Ukrainian Railways] press service on Telegram
According to Honcharenko: "Today an emergency evacuation of civilians will begin using all available municipal and private transport.
We are looking for drivers. Today we need around 30-40 drivers, we are 30 drivers short. Everyone who is not indifferent and wants to help can join.
We will continue using buses to evacuate people to safer places, where further train connections will be available. We will do this from different locations in order to avoid big crowds of people.
This [the evacuation] will take place from our city and from the neighbouring cities."
Details: Ukrzaliznytsia reported that trains will not stop at Kramatorsk station. An evacuation route from Slovyansk to Uzhhorod by train №45 is currently planned.
Trains № 274, 276, 278, and 92 are expected to depart for Lviv, Chernivtsi, Ternopil, and Odessa, respectively.
The trains will be departing as soon as they are full. The time is not publicly announced due to security concerns.
The mayor of Kramatorsk is convinced that all 4,000 civilians who were at the Kramatorsk railway station at the time of the attack could have been killed if the rocket hit the station building, rather than exploding in the air.
He thinks that the main goal of the attack was to sow panic and disrupt the Ukrainian government’s plans to safely evacuate local residents.
Honcharenko said that several of the 100 people who had been injured in the attack had their limbs torn off in the explosion.
Background:
- At 10:30 on 8 April Russian troops deployed a Tochka-U complex to carry out cluster shelling on the Kramatorsk railway station: 39 people were killed in the attack, including children, another 100 were wounded.
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine responded to the attack by urging the world to react strongly, because unpunished evil will cause even more suffering in the future.
Charles Michel, Head of the European Council, who is on an official visit to Kyiv, said that Ukraine urgently needs to be provided with even more weapons.
