A building badly damaged by bombing in Mariupol
(Picture: REUTERS)Russia has bombed an art school in Mariupol where around 400 residents had taken refuge, Ukrainian authorities claim.
Local authorities said the school’s building was destroyed and people were trapped under the rubble. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Russian forces on Wednesday also bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering, authorities have said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said an unrelenting siege by Russian troops on the port city will go down in history as a war crime.
“To do this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers did, is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address to the nation.
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been under bombardment for more than two weeks and become a symbol of the horror of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The city has been completely cut off and has no water or energy supplies.
At least 2,300 people have been killed, some of whom had to be buried in mass graves.
Russian forces have surrounded the battered city and pushed deeper into it in recent days.
Heavy fighting shut down a major steel plant and local authorities pleaded for more help from the West on Saturday.
“Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin said from a rubble-strewn street in a video addressed to Western leaders.
The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, whose advance is largely stalled outside other major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.
In the capital, Kyiv, at least 20 babies carried by Ukrainian surrogate mothers are stuck in a makeshift bomb shelter, waiting for parents to travel into the war zone to pick them up.
Some just days old, the babies are being cared for by nurses who cannot leave the shelter because of constant shelling by Russian troops who are trying to encircle the city.
Details also began to emerge about a rocket attack that killed as many as 40 marines in the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv on Friday, according to a Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times.
It wasn’t clear how many marines were inside at the time, and rescuers continued searching the rubble of the barracks.
