Kremlin forces have bombed a village school in eastern Ukraine killing about 60 people, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says, as Russia prepares to mark the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
The governor of the Luhansk region said about 90 people were sheltering at the school in Bilohorivka on Saturday when it was bombed.
“As a result of a Russian strike on Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region, about 60 people were killed, civilians, who simply hid at the school, sheltering from shelling,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
There was no response from Moscow to the news.
In the southern port of Mariupol, which has endured the most destructive fighting of the 10-week war, the deputy commander of the Azov regiment holed up in the Azovstal steel plant pleaded with the international community to help evacuate wounded soldiers.
“We will continue to fight as long as we are alive to repel the Russian occupiers,” Captain Sviatoslav Palamar told an online news conference.
Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) industrial nations vowed on Sunday to deepen Russia’s economic isolation and “elevate” a campaign against Kremlin-linked elites.
The G7 said it was committed to phasing out or banning Russian oil and denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“His actions bring shame on Russia and the historic sacrifices of its people,” the G7 said in a statement, referring to Soviet Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany 77 years ago.
Putin has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine – which he casts as a battle against dangerous “Nazi”-inspired nationalists in Ukraine – to the challenge the Soviet Union faced when Adolf Hitler invaded in 1941.
Ukraine and its allies reject the accusation of Nazism and the assertion that Russia is fighting for survival against a aggressive West, saying Putin unleashed an unprovoked war in an attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union.
In a video address, filmed in front of charred Ukrainian apartment blocks with footage of Russian missile strikes, Zelenskiy said that evil had returned, but his country would prevail.
“Russia will lose, because evil always loses.”
Putin will preside over a parade in Moscow’s Red Square on Monday of troops, tanks, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles, making a speech that could offer clues to the future of the war.
Russia has come under increasingly punishing sanctions since Putin launched what he called a “special operation” on February 24, with trade heavily impacted and assets seized.
The European Union should consider using frozen Russian foreign exchange reserves to help pay for the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after the war, foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in an interview with the Financial Times.
In the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 230km northwest of Mariupol, dozens of people who had fled the city and nearby occupied areas waited to register in a car park set up for evacuees.
“There’s lots of people still in Mariupol who want to leave but can’t,” said history teacher Viktoria Andreyeva, 46, who said she had only just reached the city after leaving her bombed home in Mariupol with her family in mid-April.
Separatists said a total of 408 people were evacuated from Mariupol over the past 24 hours, including 65 children.
Mariupol is key to Moscow’s efforts to link the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Russia in 2014, and parts of the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that have been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since then.
In Luhansk and Donetsk regions, half a dozen Russian attacks were repulsed, with tanks and armoured combat vehicles destroyed, Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said on Monday.
A number of Western officials, including US first lady Jill Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a German parliament head and the Norwegian foreign minister arrived in Ukraine on Sunday in a show of support.
