Russia bombs school sheltering hundreds

KYIV, Mar 20 (AFP): Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday that Russia had bombed a school sheltering 400 people in the besieged port of Mariupol, as Moscow claimed that it had again fired a hypersonic missile in Ukraine, the second time it had used the next-generation weapon on its neighbour.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the siege of Mariupol, a strategic mostly Russian-speaking port in the southeast where utilities and communications have been cut for days, would go down as a war crime, warning Russians that thousands of their soldiers had died in the conflict.
The war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin launched on February 24 to stamp out the pro-Western bent in the ex-Soviet country, has sparked the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, felled Russia-West relations to Cold War-era lows, and is wreaking havoc in the world economy still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.
"Yesterday, the Russian occupiers dropped bombs on an art school No 12," the Mariupol city council said on messaging app Telegram on Sunday, adding that around 400 women, children and elderly people had been sheltering there from bombardments.
"Peaceful civilians are still under the rubble," it said, adding that the building had been destroyed.
City authorities also claimed that some residents of Mariupol were being forcibly taken to Russia and stripped of their Ukrainian passports.
"The occupiers are sending the residents of Mariupol to filtration camps, checking their phones and seizing (their) Ukrainian documents," Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk regional administration said, adding that more than 1,000 Mariupol residents had been deported.
"I appeal to the international community: put pressure on Russia and its madman of a leader," he said on Facebook.
Russia's defence ministry said on Sunday that Moscow had again fired its newest Kinzhal (Dagger) hypersonic missile, destroying a fuel storage site in the southern Mykolaiv region.
The strike came a day after it said it used the sophisticated weapon for the first time in combat to destroy an underground missile and ammunition storage site in western Ukraine close to the border with NATO member Romania.
Humanitarian conditions continued to go from bad to worse in the mostly Russian-speaking south and east of the country, where Russian forces have been pressing their advance, as well as in the north around the capital Kyiv.
Aid agencies have warned they are struggling to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped by the invading Russian forces.
The port of Mariupol has been one of the worst cities hit, as it occupies a strategic position-its capture would link the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, with the separatist eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which broke away the same year and are controlled by Moscow-backed rebels.
Thousands of civilians are thought to be trapped inside the city, where communication, water, electricity and gas have been cut. Russia said on Saturday it had broken through the city's defences and its troops were inside.
Last Wednesday, a theatre where more than 1,000 people had sheltered was hit, with hundreds still presumed missing in the rubble.
"This is no longer Mariupol, it's hell," said resident Tamara Kavunenko, 58.
"The streets are full with the bodies of civilians."
In his daily video message, Zelensky said that "To do such a thing to a peaceful city, what the occupiers have done, this is a terror that will be remembered even in the next century."
The Ukrainian president, who has gained world-wide fame and admiration for staying in his capital in the face of the Russian advance, warned the Russian people that the war was costing thousands of their soldiers' lives.
"Where the battles are especially fierce, the front line is simply littered with corpses of Russian soldiers," he said, saying that 14,000 Russian servicemen had been killed.
"And (the number of) victims will only continue to rise," he warned.
Russia has not provided a toll of its soldiers since early March, when it said nearly 500 servicemen had been killed.