Escape to a school wasn’t enough. Sixty people, all civilians according to Ukrainian authorities, died on Saturday after the bomb attack on a school in the Luhansk region in the east of the country. Only about twenty villagers survived this bombardment, which according to Serguiï Gaïda, the region’s governor, “completely destroyed” the school. Franceinfo takes stock of this bloody strike attributed to the Russian army.
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Almost a hundred people were hiding in this school
The facts happened on Saturday, May 7, in the village of Bilohorivka, located about a hundred kilometers northeast of the city of Luhansk, the capital of the region under the control of the Russian army. According to Ukrainian authorities, a bomb dropped by the Russian air force targeted a school in the center of this village where 90 people were hiding to flee the bombing. The first assessment by local authorities, which reported 60 deaths, was echoed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a video conference intervention at a G7 summit on Sunday.
In an interview with The Guardian on Sunday, the Luhansk region governor said the building “completely collapsed” during the strike. “An aerial bomb is not a rocket,” explained Serguiï Gaïda, such an explosion generates extreme temperatures.” On site, the intensity of the fire and the onset of darkness slowed down the Ukrainian firefighters considerably. Fearing being spotted by the Russian army and attacked by fresh bombardments, the rescuers decided not to turn on their flashlights and therefore had to wait in vain for daybreak to find survivors.
Shelling in eastern Ukraine intensified
Strikes have intensified in the east of the country in recent days, and Russia could be tempted to annex it. This massive use of bombs and missiles has sometimes been explained with the approach of May 9, a key date for Vladimir Putin. Residents of some cities like Lyman in Donetsk Oblast have no choice but to leave.
On Saturday, another strike attributed to the Russian army hit a village a few kilometers from Bilohorivka, and specifically a house housing a dozen people, the region’s governor said. Due to a “higher probability of bombings of Ukrainian cities on May 8 and 9,” several regional governors have decided to cancel World War II commemorations originally scheduled for Sunday across the country.
For the Ukrainian government, Vladimir Putin has ‘no more borders’
A children’s hospital on March 10, a theater in Mariupol on March 17: the list of buildings bombed while housing civilians is growing, angering the Ukrainian authorities. On Sunday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy castigated the previous day’s “violent bombings” to the leaders of the G7, “as if it wasn’t May 8 (…) when the key word should be peace for all normal people”. “Ukraine and the free world will remember that,” he said.
“It is absolutely clear that Vladimir Putin no longer knows any borders,” warned Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna in an interview with franceinfo. According to the latter, Moscow wants to take control of the Donbass region and all of southern Ukraine “at any cost”. “Nothing can stop it, nothing can stop it, she lamented, except for the Ukrainian army and the pressure of financial sanctions against her government.”
As the European Union continues to harden its stance on Russia, the G7 countries announced through the White House on Sunday that they intend to ban or phase out their imports of Russian oil.
In his traditional May 9 speech, Vladimir Putin again justified the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine on Monday. “NATO was approaching our territories. (…) Russia did everything possible to prevent the aggressor from being pushed back,” the Russian autocrat in particular declared before taking part in a gigantic military parade in Moscow’s Red Square.