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At least 52 people were killed, including five children, Friday in a Russian rocket attack on a railroad station in eastern Ukraine — where civilians were trying to evacuate to safer parts of the country amid the brutal invasion, officials said.

Graphic photographs provided by Ukrainian officials showed bodies strewn on the ground next to scattered luggage and charred vehicles.

The remains of a large rocket with the words “for the children” in Russian painted on it also was seen on the ground next to the station.

Russia has for years accused Ukraine of killing civilians, including children, with strikes in separatist-held eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station at the time of the attack — many of them women and children heeding calls to leave the region amid warnings of Russia launching a full-scale offensive in the country’s east.

“Two rockets hit Kramatorsk railway station,” Ukrainian Railways said in a statement Friday that called the attack a “purposeful strike on the passenger infrastructure of the railway and the residents of the city of Kramatorsk.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement on Facebook that a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile was used in the deadly strike.

“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.”

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said the shocking attack on innocent people was deliberate.

“The ‘Rashists’ (‘Russian fascists’) knew very well where they were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they wanted to take as many civilians as possible,” he said.

Kyrylenko posted a horrifying photograph online showing several bodies lying beside piles of suitcases as armed police officers wearing flak jackets stood beside them.

Another image showed emergency personnel fighting a fire as thick smoke rose into the air.

Russia denied its involvement in the attack.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the involvement of Russian forces in the attack had already been ruled out by the Russian Ministry of Defense, based on the type of missile cited by Zelensky.

“Our armed forces do not use missiles of this type,” Peskov told reporters during a press briefing Friday. “No combat tasks were set or planned for today in Kramatorsk.”

Kyrylenko said that 50 people were killed, including five children, and that the ballistic missile contained cluster munitions — a brutal weapon that detonates mid-air and releases smaller “bomblets” in order to hit multiple targets over a large area.

“They wanted to take as many civilians as possible,” he said.

Still, Kyrylenko said the “evacuation will continue” despite the attack.

“Anyone who wants to leave the region will be able to do so,” he said.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians since the country launched its invasion on Feb. 24.

However, intercepted radio messages released Thursday appeared to catch Russian troops complaining about being vastly outnumbered — and being ordered to “f–king kill” civilians, according to Ukraine intelligence.

“Civilians, everyone, slay them all!” a Russian commander barked at his underlings during the brutal assault on Mariupol, according to a clip released Wednesday by the Security Service of Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have warned that Russians have been regrouping for a new offensive — and that Moscow plans to seize as much territory as it can in the eastern part of Ukraine known as Donbas bordering Russia.  

Farther west toward the capital of Kyiv, more than 300 people have been reportedly killed by Russian forces in Bucha, 50 of whom were executed, Sky News reported.  Moscow claimed the verified images of bodies in the town were staged by the Ukrainian government to derail peace negotiations.

Zelensky said a similar situation to Bucha was unfolding about 15 miles away in Borodyanka.

“The work on dismantling the debris in Borodyanka began… It’s much worse there,” he said in his nightly presidential address. 

“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian military did in Mariupol? There, on almost every street, is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region after the withdrawal of Russian troops,” Zelensky continued.

“The same cruelty. The same heinous crimes,” he added.

Russian forces pulled out of Bucha last week, under pressure from Ukrainian forces, but relief at their departure soon turned to grief as the numbers of deaths became apparent.

The war, which has now entered its seventh week, has seen millions flee Ukraine, thousands killed and injured, and once-thriving cities reduced to rubble.

Moscow said one of its aims is to “liberate” largely Russian-speaking places such as the southern port of Mariupol from the threat of genocide by Ukrainian nationalists, who it says have used civilians as human shields.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, speaking in his first broadcast interview with British media since the invasion started, told Sky News the images coming out of Bucha were a “well-staged insinuation, nothing else”.

Dmitry Peskov said “we’re living in days of fakes and lies” and that the verified images of dead civilians were a “bold fake”.

“We deny the Russian military can have something in common with these atrocities and that dead bodies were shown on the streets of Bucha,” he told Sky News.