By Shirat Shivan Tuhirirwe,
WORLD NEWS
About 60 people were killed after a bomb hit a school in East Ukraine in Luhansk region on Saturday.
According to Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk region, over 90 people had been sheltering in the building in Bilohorivka, and 30 were rescued.
Haidai said a Russian plane had dropped the bomb on Saturday, but, Russia has not commented on the explosions.
For the past Eight years, Russian troops and separatist fighters have taken control of the Luhansk region in their pursuit to surround government forces.
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On Saturday, heavy fighting was reported in Severodonetsk city that accomodates Bilohorivka suburbs where the blasts took place.
The blast brought down the building which caught fire and it took firefighters three hours to extinguish the blaze, leaving almost the entire village sheltering in the basement of the school.
The final death toll had not been known known as government was still working hard to clear the rubble.
General Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary condemned killing of civilians saying that he was “appalled” by the deadly attack.
“…civilians must always be spared in times of war”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), responsible for coordinating evacuations from Mariupol alongside the UN, said 170 civilians arrived in the relatively safe city of Zaporizhzhia from Mariupol on Sunday.
The Red Cross said the four-day operation, which began on 5 May, “included the evacuation of 51 civilians from Azovstal”.
Since Russia’s invasion began on 24 February, the UN has recorded at least 2,345 civilian deaths and 2,919 injured in Ukraine, the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in an update last month. Thousands of combatants are also believed to have been killed or injured on both sides.
More than 12 million people are said to have fled their homes since the conflict began, with 5.7 million leaving for neighbouring countries and another 6.5 million people thought to be displaced inside the war-torn country itself.
