[9] On the night of 7 April, pro-Russian Telegram channel ZАПИСКИ VЕТЕРАНА ("Veteran's Notes") warned civilians not to evacuate from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk on railways.

[12][13][14] According to the Ukrainian government, between 1000 and 4000 civilians, mainly women and children, were present at the station awaiting evacuation from the region, which was being subjected to heavy Russian shelling.

[15][16] At 10:24 and 10:25, media affiliated with the People's Republic of Donetsk published videos showing a pair of missiles being launched from Shakhtarsk, a city under separatist control.

[24] Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, said that the "strike on a densely populated urban area of Ukraine is yet another demonstration of the blatant disregard for civilian life, which has by now sadly become a steady feature of this military aggression".

Serial numbers cannot be used to prove which side fired the missile, however, since all Tochka-U's were manufactured at a single site in Russia and distributed from there across the Soviet Union.

[42][43] A fake video clip with a mock BBC logo, attributing blame to the Ukrainian forces, circulated through pro-Russian telegram channels since 10 April.

However, Amnesty International, the investigative journalists of the Conflict Intelligence Team, and a number of military experts had already reported the use of Tochkas by Russian forces in multiple parts of Ukraine prior to the strike on Kramatorsk.

[46] Moreover, investigators from the open-source Belarusian Hajun project had published videos of several Russian trucks with Tochka missiles heading from Belarus to Ukraine with 'V' markings on 5 and 30 March 2022.

[47] The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the Russian 8th Combined Arms Army, which is active in the Donbas area, is equipped with Tochka-U missiles.