Two people have been killed and 60 more are feared dead following a Russian airstrike on a school in the Ukrainian village of Bilohorivka yesterday, according to the governor of the Luhansk region.
Around 90 people were using the Belogorovskaya school basement as a bomb shelter when the site suffered a direct hit on Saturday evening, regional governor Serhiy Haidai confirmed via the Telegram messaging app this morning.
Footage and images of the school show the extent of the destruction, with large sections of the building reduced to rubble and a team of firefighters drafted in to combat the resulting blaze.
Rescuers managed to pull thirty people out of the ruins last night, Haidai said, but up to sixty more remain trapped in the basement and are thought to have been killed.
‘The fire was extinguished after nearly four hours, then the rubble was cleared, and unfortunately the bodies of two people were found,’ Haidai wrote.
‘Sixty people are likely to have died under the rubble of buildings.’
Rescuers continued to work from the early hours, attempting to clear the remaining rubble and free any remaining survivors.
Separately, Haidai said that according to preliminary information, shelling in the village of Shypilovo destroyed a house and 11 people remained under the building’s debris.
There was no immediate response from Russian authorities.
The latest devastation in Luhansk comes just one week after the Lysychansk Multidisciplinary Gymnasium, a prestigious Ukrainian school built in the 19th century, was completely destroyed in another attack.
Footage from the incident shows the shell of the historic structure crumbling as flames raged throughout its corridors and hallways.
‘After the victory of Ukraine, we will make every effort to restore the gymnasium,’ Haidai said last week, while former graduate Yana Goncharenko told Ukrainskaya Pravda: ‘It was created more than 100 years ago by the Belgians. It was among the top 100 schools in the country. It survived two world wars and the battle for the city in 2014, but animals without morals burned it down in 2022.’
Emergency crew tend to a fire near a burning debris, after a school building was hit as a result of shelling, in the village of Bilohorivka, Luhansk, Ukraine, in the early hours of May 8, 2022
The brutal airstrikes on civilian shelters and residential areas came as the World Health Organisation (WHO) said it would help investigations into Russian war crimes by documenting instances of targeted attacks on Ukrainian healthcare facilities.
WHO Emergencies Director Mike Ryan told a news conference yesterday that organisation has already documented 200 separate attacks on hospitals and clinics in Ukraine since the conflict began on February 24.
He confirmed the WHO would pass on the evidence to investigators, as WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus expressed his support for Ukraine from Kyiv on Saturday.
‘My message to all the people of Ukraine is this,’ he said, speaking from the government media center in the capital. ‘WHO stands by you.’
Source: Daily Mail
