By ADAM SCHRECK and CARA ANNA

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A missile hit a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians, killing dozens of people, Ukrainian authorities said Friday after warning they expected even worse evidence of war crimes in parts of the country previously held by Russian troops.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that thousands of people were at the train station when the missile struck. The Russian Defense Ministry denied targeting the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy blamed Russia for the bodies lying in what looked like an outdoor waiting area.

“The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” the president said on social media. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”

The regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, later said that 39 people were killed and 87 wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russian forces arrived.

“The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew.

Venediktova spoke as workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under spitting rain. Black body bags were laid out in rows in the mud. None of the dead were Russians; she said. Most of them had been shot. The prosecutor general’s office is investigating the deaths as possible war crimes.

After failing to take Ukraine’s capital and withdrawing from northern Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some areas. The train station is located in government-controlled territory.

Ukrainian officials warned residents this week to leave as soon as possible for safer parts of the country and said they and Russia had agreed to establish multiple evacuation routes in the east.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy predicted more gruesome discoveries would be made in northern cities and towns as the Russians depart. He said horrors worse than the ones in Bucha already had surfaced in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital.

“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Zelenskyy said late Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering during Russia’s invasion. “There, on every street, is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region….The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”

The prosecutor general also expressed concern about the death toll in Borodyanka, where the process of retrieving bodies from shelled and collapsed buildings has just begun. Twenty-six bodies were found Thursday from the ruins of just two buildings, Venediktova said.

“We don’t know what’s under these houses,” she said, estimating it could take two weeks to find out.

Spurred by reports that Russian forces committed atrocities in areas surrounding the capital, NATO nations agreed to increase their supply of arms after Ukraine’s foreign minister pleaded for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help face down an expected offensive in the east.

Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians during the Russian occupation. Most victims died from gunshots, not from shelling, he said, and some corpses with their hands tied were “dumped like firewood” into mass graves, including one at a children’s camp.

Fedoruk said 320 civilians were confirmed dead as of Wednesday, but he expected more as bodies are found in the city that was home to 50,000 people. Only 3,700 remain, he said.

Ukrainian and several Western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported Germany’s foreign intelligence agency intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers discussing killings of civilians. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.

In a rare acknowledgment of the war’s cost to Russia, a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that the country has suffered major troop causalities during its six-week military operation in Ukraine.

“Yes, we have significant losses of troops and it is a huge tragedy for us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told British broadcaster Sky.

Peskov also hinted the fighting might be over “in the foreseeable future,” telling Sky that Russian troops were “doing their best to bring an end to that operation.”

Asked about his remarks Friday, Peskov said his reference to troop losses was based on the most recent Russian Defense Ministry numbers. The ministry reported on March 25 that a total of 1,351 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine.

“It is a significant number,” Peskov said during his daily conference call with reporters.

In anticipation of intensified attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions that were either under attack or occupied.

Marina Morozova and her husband fled from Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russians.

“They are waiting for a big battle. We saw shells that did not explode. It was horrifying,” she said.

Morozova, 69, said only Russian television and radio was available. The Russians handed out humanitarian aid, she said, and filmed the distribution.

Anxious to keep moving away from Russian troops, the couple and others boarded a van that would take them west. Some will try to leave the country, while others will remain in quieter parts of Ukraine.

On Thursday, a day after Russian forces began shelling their village in the southern Mykolaiv region, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove north in his small blue Lada with his wife and mother-in-law to Bashtanka, where they sought shelter in a church.

“They started destroying the houses and everything” in Pavlo-Marianovka, he said. “Then the tanks appeared from the forest. We thought that in the morning there would be shelling again, so I decided to leave.”

The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said that more than 4.3 million, half of them children, have left Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24 and sparked Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. The International Organization for Migration estimates more than 12 million people are stranded in areas of Ukraine under attack.

The United Nations’ humanitarian chief told The Associated Press he was “not optimistic” about securing a cease-fire after meeting with officials in Kyiv and in Moscow this week, given the lack of trust between the sides. He spoke hours after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Ukraine of backtracking on proposals it had made over Crimea and Ukraine’s military status.

Two top European Union officials and the prime minister of Slovakia traveled to Kyiv on Friday, looking to shore up the EU’s support for Ukraine. Prime Minister Eduard Heger said he, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell brought trade and humanitarian aid proposals for Zelenskyy and his government.

Part of that, Heger says is “to offer options for transporting grains, including wheat.” Ukraine is a major world wheat supplier and Russia’s war on Ukraine is creating shortages, notably in the Middle East.

Western nations have stepped up sanctions against Russia following the alleged atrocities found on the outskirts of Kyiv. A day after the United States imposed sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, the European Union and Britain followed suit Friday.

The U.S. Congress voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and ban the importation of its oil, while the EU approved an embargo on coal imports. The U.N. General Assembly, meanwhile, voted to suspend Russia from the world organization’s leading human rights body.

U.S. President Joe Biden said the U.N. vote demonstrated how “Putin’s war has made Russia an international pariah.” He called the images coming from Bucha “horrifying.”

“The signs of people being raped, tortured, executed — in some cases having their bodies desecrated — are an outrage to our common humanity,” Biden said.

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Anna reported from Bucha, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Chernihiv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By ADAM SCHRECK and ANDREA ROSA

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine told residents of its industrial heartland to leave while they still can and urged Western nations to send “weapons, weapons and weapons” Thursday after Russian forces withdrew from the shattered outskirts of Kyiv to regroup for an offensive in the country’s east.

Russia’s six-week-old invasion failed to take Ukraine’s capital quickly and achieve what Western countries say was President Vladimir Putin’s initial aim of ousting the Ukrainian government. Russia’s focus is now on the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine.

In Brussels, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged NATO to provide more weapons and help his war-torn country prevent further alleged atrocities. Ukrainian authorities are working to identify hundreds of bodies found in Kyiv’s northern outskirts after Russian troops withdrew and to document evidence of possible war crimes.

“My agenda is very simple. … it’s weapons, weapons and weapons,” Kuleba said as he arrived at NATO headquarters for talks with the military organization’s foreign ministers.

“The more weapons we get and the sooner they arrive in Ukraine, the more human lives will be saved,” he said.

While NATO is striving to avoid actions that might draw any of its 30 members into a war with Russia, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged nations that belong to the Western alliance to send Ukraine more weapons, and not just defensive arms.

Western countries have provided Ukraine with portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, but they have been reluctant to supply aircraft, tanks or any equipment that Ukrainian troops would have to be trained to use.

Moscow announced more than a week ago that it planned to concentrate its forces in the east, and they have largely withdrawn from Kyiv and the north. Growing numbers of Putin’s troops, along with mercenaries, have been reported moving into the Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some territory.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged civilians to evacuate to safer regions before it was too late. She said Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to establish 10 civilian evacuation routes Thursday.

The change of Russia’s focus brought relief to Chernihiv, a city near Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus that was encircled and cut off for weeks,

The departed troops left behind twisted buildings and traumatized residents, who clambered over rubble and passed cars destroyed by the fighting. Dozens of people lined up for food, diapers and medicine Thursday at a shattered school now serving as an aid-distribution point.

The blackboard in one classroom was chalked, “Wednesday the 23rd of February – class work.” Russia invaded Ukraine the next day, besieging Chernihiv as its troops tried to sweep south towards the capital.

“At last we can bring food,” said Viktiriia Veruha, who was distributing aid at the school. “We can now bring food, medicine, and we can evacuate people from Chernihiv, which is also very important.”

Tatiana Nesterenko, who left the city and crossed to Medyka in Poland, joined more than 4.3 million refugees who have fled Ukraine since the war started.

“We spent 40 days in a basement,” she said. ”Our home was destroyed by an airstrike. … Many people are homeless now, and there were a lot of victims. There was no help, no volunteers for us. We extinguished the fire by ourselves.”

Britain’s defense ministry said Thursday that Russia was targeting the “line of control” between Ukrainian-held and rebel-controlled areas in the Donbas with artillery and airstrikes and hitting infrastructure targets around Ukraine to wear down the Ukrainian defense.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck fuel storage sites around the cities of Mykolaiv, Zaporozhe, Kharkiv and Chuguev overnight using cruise missiles fired from ships in the Black Sea.

A Ukrainian naval vessel caught fire under unclear circumstances in the besieged port city of Mariupol, satellite photos analyzed Thursday by The Associated Press show. The images from Planet Labs PBC appear to show the Ukrainian command ship Donbas burning at the Sea of Azov port on Wednesday afternoon as a nearby building also burned.

Mariupol has experienced some of the war’s greatest deprivations. Russian forces are fighting street by street to capture the city; doing so would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said more than 5,000 civilians have been killed, including 210 children. British defense officials estimate that 160,000 people remain trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000.

Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians were found in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv, victims of what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture.

In areas north of the capital, Ukrainian officials gathered evidence of Russian atrocities amid signs Moscow’s troops killed people indiscriminately before retreating. Some victims were apparently shot at close range or died with their hands bound.

Western officials warned that similar atrocities were likely to have taken place in other areas occupied by Russian troops. Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of removing dead bodies in an attempt to cover up war crimes in areas still under their control, “afraid that the global anger over what was seen in Bucha would be repeated.”

“This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more,” he said in a nighttime video address.

The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine before the grim discoveries near Kyiv fueled more urgent calls for the perpetrators of civilian atrocities to be brought to justice. Ukrainian authorities were transferring piles of body bags to a facility for identification and investigation,

The Kremlin insists its troops have committed no war crimes and alleged the Ukrainians staged images of brutality coming out of Bucha and nearby towns.

The French government summoned Russia’s ambassador over a tweet suggesting that images of dead civilians were phony. The tweet on Thursday, which has since been removed but reprinted by numerous French media outlets, showed a street in Bucha with a demolished tank and numerous journalists under the caption “film set.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the tweet “indecent.”

Two former German government ministers submitted a criminal complaint with federal prosecutors, hoping to use national laws to seek a war crimes probe against Russian officials, including Putin and Russian military personnel.

Lawyer Nikolaos Gazeas, who compiled the 140-page criminal complaint, cited a report Thursday by news weekly Der Spiegel that said Germany’s foreign intelligence agency had intercepted radio messages between Russian soldiers discussing the killings of civilians in Bucha.

Members of the U.S. House late Wednesday overwhelmingly passed legislation calling for a federal government report on evidence of war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putin’s two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union is also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on Russian coal.

Zelenskyy said the sanctions would not be effective unless they included a ban on Russian oil imports, on which Europe relies heavily.

Since the war started, Russia and Ukraine have held talks, both by video link and in person, but have not found common ground to end the fighting.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday accused Ukraine of backtracking on proposals it had made over Crimea and Ukraine’s military status. Lavrov accused Washington and its allies of pushing Ukraine to keep fighting, but said Russia intended to continue the talks.

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Rosa reported from Chernihiv, Ukraine. Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine