AFP, POLTAVA, Ukraine
Kyiv and Moscow yesterday traded blame for a strike on a school in a Ukrainian-occupied town in Russia’s Kursk region, while Kyiv also said weekend missile and drone attacks killed at least 15 people in Ukraine.
Fighting in the nearly three-year war has shown no signs of de-escalating, despite US President Donald Trump’s promise to enact a ceasefire within “24 hours” of taking office on Jan. 20.
Russia and Ukraine have each accused the other of killing civilians since the war began, with the latest blame exchanged over Sudzha, a Ukrainian-occupied town near the border. The Ukrainian Air Force yesterday said that four people were killed in an attack the previous day on a three-story former school building sheltering evacuated civilians, with dozens more fished from the rubble.
A Ukrainian soldier patrols a street next to buildings damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in Sudzha, Russia, on Aug. 16 last year.
Photo: Reuters
Russia has not given a toll for the strike, but accused Kyiv of targeting the school in a “crime that has no forgiveness and no statute of limitations.”
Across Ukraine, at least 15 people were killed as Russian strikes pummeled the center and east of the country overnight Friday into Saturday, regional authorities and police said.
Eleven people, including a child, were killed in Poltava when a missile hit a residential building early on Saturday, the local administration said.
Officials said at least 16 people were wounded as rescuers used cranes to comb the ruins of the smoldering building for survivors.
“On the fifth floor, a woman, my friend, was carried out,” said Olena Svyryd, a Poltava local. “She’s not alive. She was crushed by the wall. There were a lot of casualties.”
Another three people were killed at the weekend in Sumy region, and one in Kharkiv, Ukrainian authorities said.
In Sudzha, which Ukraine has occupied for more than five months, Kyiv accused Russia of using guided bombs on the former boarding school, carrying out Saturday’s strike against its own civilians.
“Russian aviation carried out a strike using a guided aerial bomb on a place of temporary residence of the civilian population,” the Ukrainian Air Force said yesterday. “Hitting civilians with bombs is a signature style of Russian criminals! Even when the civilians are local residents, Russians.”
The Air Force put the toll at four dead, four seriously wounded and 80 rescued.
Moscow responded Sunday by accusing Kyiv’s forces of the attack.
“On February 1, the Ukrainian Armed Forces committed another war crime by launching a targeted missile strike on a boarding school in the city of Sudzha,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement.
The ministry did not mention any deaths, while Kursk region’s active governor Aleksandr Khinshtein said that “there is no reliable information about the number of victims yet.”
Kyiv launched a surprise operation into the Kursk region in August last year, seizing dozens of villages and small towns, including the regional hub of Sudzha — home to about 6,000 people before the fighting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Russia “devoid of civility,” sharing a video on social media showing a heavily damaged building.
