By Valerie Hopkins
At least 15 people have been killed and 24 injured in a school shooting on Monday in the Russian city of Izhevsk, 600 miles east of Moscow, according to Russian authorities. The Kremlin called the shooting a terrorist attack.
A gunman entered School Number 88, which teaches the first to 11th grades, and killed four adults and 11 children before killing himself.
Authorities said the attacker, who was armed with two pistols, “was wearing a black top with Nazi symbols and a balaclava” and was not carrying any ID.
“President Putin deeply mourns the deaths of people, children at a school where there was a terrorist attack by a person, who apparently belongs to a neo-fascist group,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a phone call.
“The president wishes for the recovery of those injured as a result of this inhuman terrorist attack.”
The shooting came on the same day a gunman opened fire at a Siberian military enlistment center, injuring a recruitment officer, as anger mounted over President Vladimir Putin’s plan to mobilize hundreds of thousands of civilians to bolster Russia’s struggling army in Ukraine.
There appeared to be no link between the shooting at the school and the conflict in Ukraine.
In the past three years, there have been at least 13 mass shootings in Russia, including a school shooting in Kazan in May 2021 that resulted in nine deaths.
Izhevsk, population 630,000, is the regional capital of the Udmurt Republic. The regional governor there, Aleksandr Brechalov, declared three days of mourning.