Ukrainian army
Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kirilenko said in a television interview on Sunday that fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces is still taking place inside the eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
Many of Mariupol’s 400,000 residents have been trapped for more than two weeks as Russia seeks to seize the city to help secure a land corridor to Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The Ukrainian General Staff announced that the Russian forces had taken control of the port of Mariupol in southern Ukraine.
The Russian army bombed an art school that used a shelter for hundreds of people in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, local authorities were quoted by AFP as saying on Sunday, adding that civilians were trapped under the rubble.
“Yesterday (Saturday) the Russian occupiers threw bombs at the G12 art school located on the left bank of Mariupol, where 400 of its residents – women, children and the elderly – took refuge,” the municipality of this coastal city besieged by Moscow forces announced.
“We know that the building was destroyed, and that peaceful civilians are still under the rubble,” she added, in a statement posted on Telegram. Work is underway to determine the number of victims.
It was not immediately possible to verify this information independently.
Russia launched a large-scale attack on its neighbor Ukraine, last February 24, following the latter announced its intention to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which Moscow sees as a threat to its national security due to the increasing military activities of the West near its borders.
Immediately following the Russian invasion, the United States of America and Western countries announced harsh and violent economic sanctions once morest Russia in an attempt to isolate it from the world.
