An Associated Press (AP) journalist who visited the Chaplino railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk region said he did not see Ukrainian soldiers among the dead.
The Russian military attacked Chaplino on the evening of 24 August. As a result of the shelling, 25 people were killed . The next day, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that “over 200 servicemen of the reserve of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” and 10 units of military equipment were destroyed at the station.
AP writes that this attack has signs of a war crime. According to Michael Newton, a professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Law, even a strike on a small group of military personnel can be considered a war crime if a large number of civilians became victims as a result.
The Russian Ministry of Defense stated that the shelling of Chaplino was carried out with the help of Iskanders. As former British intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge points out, these are costly, precision-guided missiles that are not used for trivial missions. That is why he believes that the shelling of Chaplino is a deliberate strike on a civilian object in order to cause casualties among the civilian population and disrupt railway traffic for civilians.
According to the deputy head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Kyrylo Tymoshenko, two children were among those killed in Chaplino. One of them is an 11-year-old boy, he died under the rubble of the house. Another 6-year-old child – during a fire in a car near the station. Also, 31 people were injured.
