Russian missile strike kills four at a school in northern Ukraine, says senior official
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Rescuers carrying the body of a victim from the destroyed school in Romny, in Ukraine's Sumy region.
PHOTO: AFP
KYIV - A Russian missile strike killed four people at a school in northern Ukraine on Wednesday, including the principal and a librarian, according to a top Ukrainian official.
Russian forces also struck an empty kindergarten on Wednesday, and three civilians were killed in Russian shelling on Tuesday, the Ukrainian authorities said.
The attacks, none of which could be confirmed independently, appeared to be the latest in a series of strikes by Russian forces on civilian targets since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost 18 months ago.
The United Nations has recorded the killings of about 9,500 civilians in that time, but notes that the actual figures may be “considerably higher”.
Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko said the attack on the school on Wednesday came at 10am in the northern city of Romny, in the Sumy region, about 100km south-west of the Russian border.
Four people who were walking past the school at the time of the strike were injured, he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, noting that some residents had not heeded warnings to take shelter. He did not elaborate.
Mr Klymenko posted photographs that he said showed the aftermath of the missile strike. One shows rescue workers crawling through the rubble of a building.
Another shows emergency workers carrying a corpse wrapped in a white plastic sheet away from the building’s wreckage.
Ukrainian regions close to the Russian border and areas near the front line have borne the brunt of Moscow’s strikes. One frequent target is Kherson, a southern region where Ukrainian forces regained partial control last autumn.
Six people were injured in the Kherson region on Wednesday when Russian forces dropped two guided bombs on a kindergarten and residential buildings before dawn, said Mr Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration.
“The bombing caused a fire,” he said on Telegram, adding that it had since been extinguished.
Three residents of the village of Torske in the Donetsk region died in Russian shelling on Tuesday, according to Mr Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the regional military administration. The village is a few kilometres east of Lyman, a town taken by Russian forces in May 2022 and then recaptured by Ukraine in the autumn. It now lies close to a front line in the east of the country. NYTIMES
