While Russia claimed it had targeted the train because it was carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment on Wednesday, an Associated Press reporter said there was no visible sign that Ukrainian troops, including children, were among the dead. If civilians were targeted, experts said Thursday, the attack could be considered a war crime. “A train station is generally a civilian object and should not be targeted,” said Jennifer Trahan, a clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. Wednesday’s attack in Chaplyne, a small village in southeastern Ukraine, was one of the deadliest in months on the country’s sprawling rail system. In the more than six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the AP and the PBS series “Frontline” have independently verified more than 40 attacks on civilian infrastructure that could be considered war crimes. Three of them hit the country’s railway infrastructure and seven involved local bus stops, killing more than 100 civilians. In these attacks, there is little evidence to support Moscow’s claims that Ukrainian troops were targeted. The deadly strike on Wednesday came as Ukrainians defiantly celebrated their Independence Day while remaining on high alert amid threats that Russia would use the occasion to launch attacks.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and an upcoming documentary.

More than 50 people, including children, were on their way to leave Donbass when they were killed in a Russian attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk in April. Photos from the aftermath showed dead bodies and abandoned luggage strewn around the station. Railroad cars are crushed and pierced by fire. Mykola Lukashuk, chairman of the Dnipropetrovsk regional council, said during a press conference on Friday that the Chaplyne shelling led to a fire in five carriages of the train. A family, including a 17-year-old daughter, was killed when their car was hit as they traveled from Donetsk. “People were being evacuated from Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region, and a train was leaving from there to Lviv,” Lukashuk said. The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said Thursday that an 11-year-old boy died under the rubble of a nearby house and a 6-year-old died in a car fire next to the station. Tetiana Kvitnytska, deputy head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional health department, told the AP that those in Wednesday’s attack suffered head injuries, broken limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds. “There is no such war crime that the Russian invaders have not yet committed on the territory of Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the UN Security Council on Wednesday. Russia’s defense ministry said an Iskander missile was used to carry out the attack and that 200 reservists were “destroyed on their way to the combat zone”. An AP reporter who went to the scene said no Ukrainian soldiers were visible among the dead. Even if some members of the military were among the dead, the attack could violate the laws of war if it disproportionately harmed civilians. “If you’re going to kill a small number of troops as opposed to a large number of civilians, that’s a war crime,” said Michael Newton, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school and director of the international legal studies program. Iskander missiles are expensive precision-guided missiles and are not used for trivial missions, said Frank Ledwidge, a visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center in Kyiv and a former British military intelligence officer. “The takeaway is a deliberate strike on a civilian target to cause civilian casualties with the aim of disrupting civilian rail traffic across Ukraine,” he said. In May, Russia used precision sea-launched and air-launched missiles to strike power facilities at five railway stations mainly in Lviv, after it claimed the West was using the railway lines to deliver weapons to Ukraine. It’s not just train stations that have been targeted. Dozens of civilians waiting for buses have been killed in similar attacks. The AP has counted seven incidents where civilians were killed waiting for a bus. Photos of their bodies lying in pools of blood were shared on Telegram after the event. In Mykolaiv, five people were killed and twelve wounded at a bus stop during a Russian attack on July 29. Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych told Telegram at the time that Russian forces had fired cluster munitions at a busy intersection around 10am.

Editor’s note: The AP and “Frontline” collect information from organizations such as the Center for Information Resilience, Bellingcat, the International Partnership on Human Rights, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center and Physicians for Human Rights to inform the War Crimes interactive experience Watch Ukraine.

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