Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday that Russia had bombed a school sheltering 400 people in the besieged port of Mariupol, as Moscow claimed that it had again fired hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, the second time it had used the next-generation weapon on its neighbour.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the siege of Mariupol, a strategic mostly Russian-speaking port in the southeast where utilities and communications have been cut for days, would go down as a war crime. He also warned Russians that thousands of their soldiers had died in the conflict.
The war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin launched on February 24 to stamp out pro-Western leanings in the ex-Soviet country, has sparked the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Relations between Russia and the West have plunged to Cold War-era lows, and is wreaking havoc in the world economy still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.
"Yesterday, the Russian occupiers dropped bombs on an art school No 12," the Mariupol city council said on messaging app Telegram on Sunday, adding that around 400 women, children and elderly people had been sheltering there from bombardments.
"Peaceful civilians are still under the rubble," it said, adding that the building had been destroyed. City authorities also claimed that some residents of Mariupol were being forcibly taken to Russia and stripped of their Ukrainian passports.
"The occupiers are sending the residents of Mariupol to filtration camps, checking their phones and seizing (their) Ukrainian documents," Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk regional administration said, adding that more than 1,000 Mariupol residents had been deported. "I appeal to the international community: put pressure on Russia and its madman of a leader," he said on Facebook.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that Moscow had again fired its newest Kinzhal (Dagger) hypersonic missile, destroying a fuel storage site in the southern Mykolaiv region.
If confirmed, the strike would mark the second time Russia had used the sophisticated weapon in combat, a day after it said it used it to destroy an underground missile and ammunition storage site in western Ukraine close to the border with Nato member Romania.
Humanitarian conditions continued to deteriorate in the mostly Russian-speaking south and east of the country, where Russian forces have been pressing their advance, as well as in the north around the capital Kyiv.
Aid agencies have warned they are struggling to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped by the invading Russian forces.
The port of Mariupol has been one of the worst hit cities as it occupies a key strategic position.
Its capture would link the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, with the separatist eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which broke away the same year and are controlled by Moscow-backed rebels.
Thousands of civilians are thought to be trapped inside the city, where communication, water, electricity and gas have been cut. Russia said on Saturday it had broken through the city’s defences and its troops were inside.
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