Russia Ukraine war latest: Kyiv blames Putin for deadly missile strike on school full of civilians in Kursk – UK Times

Ukrainian military pensioner Ihor Yavorskyi spent all day on Saturday at the site of a Russian missile attack to discover what he presumed was the inevitable – identifying the bodies of three family members he was certain were killed in the strike.

Mr Yavorskyi, 61, stood together with other anxious residents alongside rubble in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava. All were waiting patiently as emergency crews retrieved the bodies of victims from part of an apartment block reduced to rubble in the assault.

Each time, he rushed over to crews carrying victims on stretchers to examine bodies being brought past. But none of those recovered so far were those of his son Dmytro, 37, daughter-in-law Alyona, 38, and granddaughter Sofia, aged nine.

“My son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter are here,” Yavorskyi said.

“They’ve been killed here, all three of them. Within a second.”Around him, crews clambered up and down vast piles of smouldering rubble and made their way through twisted metal and debris. Cranes shifted slabs of concrete out of the way to enable rescuers to sift through the mounds.

“No, again, that’s not it,” he said after hurriedly checking a new victim being brought out. “That’s an elderly person. It’s not him.”

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

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A key Vladimir Putin ally in the Russian parliament said on Sunday that he was leaving for India for a series of “important” talks.

Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s State Duma – the lower house of parliament – said in a Telegram post: “We will be in New Delhi by nightfall, important meetings and negotiations are planned tomorrow.

“India is a strategic partner. We have long-standing relations of trust and mutually beneficial cooperation with it. It is necessary to develop contacts in all areas.”

At least one civilian was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Russian region of Belgorod bordering Ukraine, the regional governor said this morning.

“A man was killed,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said of the overnight strike in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

“He died from his injuries before the ambulance crew arrived.”

Mr Gladkov said the attack took place in the village of Malinovka about 8km east of the border.

Russia’s defence ministry said it destroyed five Ukrainian drones overnight over Russian territory, including one over the Belgorod region.

The US has demanded that Ukraine should hold presidential and parliamentary elections after a ceasefire is agreed with Russia.

Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia said votes “need to be done” if a truce is agreed.

“Most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important they do so,” Keith Kellogg told the Reuters.

“I think it is good for democracy. That’s the beauty of a solid democracy, you have more than one person potentially running.”

Russia launched a barrage of drones and missiles on Ukraine on Saturday, killing 15 people and damaging dozens of residential buildings as well as energy infrastructure across the country, Ukrainian officials said.

In the central city of Poltava, Ukraine’s Emergency Services said a Russian missile had struck a residential building, killing 11 people and wounding 16, including four children.

They said 22 people were rescued from rubble and emergency crews worked well into the night. Rescue teams carried out the dead on stretchers.

Reuters TV footage showed thick columns of smoke rising from mounds of rubble outside the building, part of which was reduced to a twisted mass of metal and building materials.

Firefighters and dozens of rescuers were searching through rubble.

One retired military veteran, certain his son, daughter-in law and granddaughter had died on the first floor of the building, waited outside the building all day, checking with rescue teams for them among the bodies pulled out.

In Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, one person was killed and four were wounded in a Russian drone attack, the mayor said.

Three police officers were killed during the attacks as they patrolled streets in a village in the northeastern region of Sumy, regional officials said.

Ukraine blamed Russia for a deadly missile strike yesterday that killed at least four people in the dormitory of a boarding school situated in a part of Russia’s Kursk region held by Ukrainian forces.

Some of the war’s fiercest battles in recent months have been taking place in the Kursk region that borders Ukraine, where Kyiv forces have held swathes of the land since staging a major cross-border incursion last August.

Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on its Telegram messaging app that Russia launched an aerial bomb from Russian territory that struck a boarding school in Sudzha, killing at least four. The boarding school housed people preparing for evacuation.

As of 10pm on Saturday, 84 people had been rescued or received medical assistance, the statement said. Four of the injured were in a serious condition. Rescue efforts to clear rubble were proceeding.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack on Sudzha, some 12km from the border with Ukraine, shows how Russia fights the war

.”They destroyed the building even though dozens of civilians were there,” Mr Zelensky wrote on X.

“This is how Russia waged war against Chechnya decades ago. They killed Syrians the same way. Russian bombs destroy Ukrainian homes the same way.”

Russia blamed Ukraine for the attack. Early this morning, Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram that Ukraine’s forces launched “a targeted missile strike on a boarding school in the city of Sudzha” from the territory of Ukraine.

In the absence of Nato membership, other security guarantee proposals offered to Ukraine should be backed up by sufficient weapons from the US and Europe, and support for Kyiv to develop its own defense industry, said Volodymyr Zelensky.

He also said a French proposal to put European forces in Ukraine to act as a deterrent against Russian aggression is taking shape, but he expressed scepticism, saying many questions remained about the command-and-control structure and the number of troops and their positions.

The issue was raised by French president Emmanuel Macron and with US president Donald Trump, he said.

“I said in the presence of the two leaders that we are interested in this as a part of the security guarantee, but not as the only guarantee of safety,” he said. “That’s not enough.”

He added: “Imagine, there is a contingent. The question is who is in charge? Who is the main one? What will they do if there are Russian strikes? Missiles, disembarkation, attack from the sea, crossing of the land borderline, offensive. What will they do? What are their mandates?”

Asked if he put those questions directly to Mr Macron, he smiled and said: “We are still in the process of this dialogue.”

An Australian man who was feared dead after being captured by Russian forces is alive, foreign minister Penny Wong has announced.

Oscar Jenkins, 32, a teacher who signed up to fight for Ukraine against Russia, was taken captive in December last year. A video showed him being struck by a Russian interrogator, sparking fears for his life.

“The Australian government has received confirmation from Russia that Oscar Jenkins is alive and in custody,” Ms Wong said on Wednesday.

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