fighting. the strike left at least 57 dead, including five children. more than 100 were injured. now as the station is out of service, more civilians are boarding buses and trains in a nearby city and trying to escape. cnn s ben wedeman, right on the ground there in kramatorsk, ukraine. reporter: the air raid siren rings out. in kramatorsk s railway station, a ripped shoe, a cane left behind. they dime the station with only what they could carry. hoping to reach safer ground, but nearly 60 never left. lives cut short by a missile. on it someone scrawled in russian for the children. 4,000 people were here, waiting for a train west when the strike happened. the massacre accelerating the exodus. most of the residents of
what they are now expecting is a push by these russian forces to try and drive forward and break through ukraine s defensive positions in order to expand their control of territory across a wide area. before that happens, the focus from the ukrainian point of view is encouraging, helping people to leave, thousands of people to leave these regions as quickly as possible while they still can. mariupol, which you touched on, is an example of an encircled city where the civilian population was not able to leave and you re right today, president zelenskyy has given a grim assessment of the likely death toll from that siege. he says tens of thousands of people have died since the bombardment and the blockade. staff are there back in march. it s impossible to verify that number, but we do know that much of the city has been damaged or destroyed. a city that once had a population of around 500,000 people. phil black live on the ground in lviv. sober reporting.
kramatorsk have left the city, having been urged to do so by local authorities. as this part of the country, the entirety of eastern ukraine, braces for what could be a massive russian offensive. at the city s bus station, nikolai, a volunteer, has been helping with the evacuation. for him, news of the pullback of russian forces around the capital kyiv was bittersweet. when i heard about kyiv, i was happy, you know, but then i realized a couple seconds later that they move in to donbas. all their forces. i can t say that i m scared, but i m worrying about my people, about people, about mothers, grandparents. reporter: some are heading west. others north to the town of slovansk where trains still run. oksana and a friend and their children are bound for lviv in the far west. there s a lot of bombing here,
assisting ukraine, for taking the responsibility of russian dictator, russian war criminal putin and the whole participant of this disastrous crimes in irpin, in borodyanka, in bucha. but definitely in mariupol. and i m not sure that it should be international criminal court or it would be special criminal which can be mariupol tr tribunal, bucha tribunal. i very much appreciate that they are already here in kyiv to help us collect evidence. and i think that that would be great idea if u.s. can send the fbi expert together with us to help with the investigation and second to add the credibility. because we are open for this
front of uts, they find out the family, mother, small child and their father was founded out was buried in the destroyed building. and with that situation, i think that mariupol is still about the size of the tragedy and please imagine that mariupol is the size exactly the same like new orleans. imagine that one-third of the mariupol population is displaced. one-third is killed. and one-third is in a disastrous humanitarian condition. eating dogs or eating cats, crying for several days taking the water from their heating system and this is the disaster what russian troops do against ukraine. and they want to cover the evidence of their crime. learning the experience from bucha, and they bring the mobile