Ukraine, Russia accuse each other of deadly strike on boarding school

Kyiv: Ukraine and Russia traded blame for a deadly missile strike on Saturday that killed at least four people in the dormitory of a boarding school situated in a part of Russia’s Kursk region held by Kyiv forces.

Some of the war’s fiercest battles in recent months have been taking place in the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, where Kyiv forces have held swaths of the land since staging a major cross-border incursion last August.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Saturday.Credit: AP

Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on its Telegram messaging app that Russia had launched an aerial bomb from Russian territory that struck a boarding school in Sudzha, killing at least four. The boarding school housed people preparing for evacuation.

As of late on Saturday (Kursk time), 84 people had been rescued or had received medical assistance, the statement said. Four of the injured were in a serious condition. Rescue efforts to clear rubble were proceeding.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack on Sudzha, about 12 kilometres from the border with Ukraine, shows how Russia fights the war.

“They destroyed the building even though dozens of civilians were there,” Zelensky wrote on X.

“This is how Russia waged war against Chechnya decades ago. They killed Syrians the same way. Russian bombs destroy Ukrainian homes the same way.”

Russia’s Defence Ministry on Telegram said Ukraine’s forces had launched “a targeted missile strike on a boarding school in the city of Sudzha” from the territory of Ukraine.

Russia’s acting governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Khinshtein, also blamed Kyiv forces for the strike and said there was no reliable information yet about the number of potential victims.

Ukraine military spokesman Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi had earlier said in a video posted on Facebook that nearly 100 people were under rubble at the site, which he said had housed mostly elderly and infirm people.

Reuters was not able to verify the claims by either side independently, and the scope of the attack remained unclear.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Thousands of civilians, however, have been killed, most of them Ukrainian.

Reuters

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