By Matthew Mpoke Bigg
A Russian missile strike killed four people at a school in northern Ukraine on Wednesday, including the principal and a librarian, according to a top Ukrainian official.
Russian forces also struck an empty kindergarten Wednesday, and three civilians were killed in Russian shelling Tuesday, Ukrainian authorities said.
The attacks, none of which could be confirmed independently, appeared to be the latest in a series of strikes by Russian forces on civilian targets since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost 18 months ago. The United Nations has recorded the killings of about 9,500 civilians in that time, but notes that the actual figures may be “considerably higher.”
Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, said the attack on the school on Wednesday came at 10 a.m., in the northern city of Romny, in the Sumy region, about 60 miles southwest of the Russian border.
Four people who were walking past the school at the time of the strike were injured, he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app, noting that some residents had not heeded warnings to take shelter. He did not elaborate.
Klymenko posted photographs that he said showed the aftermath of the missile strike. One shows rescue workers crawling through the rubble of a building. Another shows emergency workers carrying a corpse wrapped in a white plastic sheet away from the building’s wreckage.
Ukrainian regions close to the Russian border and areas near to the front line have borne the brunt of Moscow’s strikes. One frequent target is Kherson, a southern region where Ukrainian forces regained partial control last fall.
Six people were injured in the Kherson region Wednesday when Russian forces dropped two guided bombs on a kindergarten and residential buildings before dawn, said Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration.
“The bombing caused a fire,” he said on Telegram, adding that it had since been extinguished.
Three residents of the village of Torske in the Donetsk region died in Russian shelling Tuesday, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional military administration. The village is a few miles east of Lyman, a town taken by Russian forces in May 2022 and then recaptured by Ukraine in the fall. It now lies close to a front line in the east of the country.