'Still processing': Montreal doctor evacuated Ukrainian patients at train station just days before attack

Just days before a missile struck a Ukrainian railroad station, claiming dozens of lives, one Quebec doctor was helping hospital patients onto trains at that very spot.

Now, Dr. Joanne Liu is back home — and she says watching the destruction from afar has been devastating and "difficult to process."

"When you're in those kind of moments where people are fleeing, fleeing for their life, you think that somehow it will be respected," Liu told CTV News.

About 4,000 civilians had been near the station in Kramatorsk the day the missile hit, most of them women and children attempting to flee the Donbas region, where fighting is expected to intensify.

"It was an evacuation spot," said Liu, who is a Montreal emergency physician and the former international president of Doctors Without Borders. "So the fact that there was this attack on this train station is really outraging, to say the least, because it was done during the daytime when it was at the busiest of the activities."

Photos from the scene show bodies covered in tarps, with abandoned suitcases and children's toys scattered outside the station.

At least 52 died in the attack and over 100 people were injured.

Liu said that despite heightened risks, doctors remain committed to continue their work on the front lines.

"We're still processing what happened," she said. "It brings a new load of challenges to a certain extent. But we are going to continue to do that for the time being."