Ukraine school bombing.Photo: HANDOUT/Ukrainian State Emergency Servic/AFP via Getty
Dozens of people are feared dead in an eastern Ukrainian village after a reported Russian airstrike hit a school allegedly serving as a bomb shelter this weekend.
More than 60 people are believed to be dead following the airstrike in Bilohorivka, Luhansk, region governor Serhiy Haidai saidin a Telegram poston Sunday.
Haidai said the school was hit around 4:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, resulting in multiple fires within the building and in the House of Culture.
After taking four hours to extinguish the fires, “the bodies of two victims were found” in the debris, Haidai wrote.
Two boys — an 11-year-old and 14-year-old — were killed, the governor said on Telegram. Their two sisters, ages 8 and 12, and their 69-year-old grandmother “were seriously injured” in the airstrike and hospitalized as a result.
“As it turned out, the grandmother and grandchildren came out of storage for a few minutes,” Haidai wrote in Russian, “and it was at this time that the enemy struck the city.”
Haidai later identified two more victims as Transcarpathian volunteers whom he said “constantly assisted in the evacuation of Luhansk residents” amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
“They rescued people every day, took them to safety, delivered rubber goods,” the governor said, later adding, “Eternal memory…🕯.”
Thirty people were reportedly removed from the rubble, including seven with injuries. The remaining 60 people under the building’s ruins “most likely” died, Haidai noted.
“These are the real atrocities of the ‘Russian world’: the cynical shelling of a school with a bomb shelter, the murder of children in Privilege,” the Luhansk governor wrote on Telegram. “The Russians don’t care who they kill. He can’t kill a defenseless child.”
Haidai continued, “We will remind that yesterday afternoon the occupying troops of the Russian Federation from ‘hailstones’ and ‘hurricanes’ fired at Privilege.”
Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelenskyyhas called for peace talks — so far unsuccessful — while urging his country to fight back.
source: people.com
