As Russia readies military pomp, Ukraine blames it for deadly school attack
SEVERODONETSK, Ukraine — A Russian strike on a school sheltering civilians claimed 60 lives, Ukraine said Sunday, as the G7 reaffirmed their unity with Kyiv on the eve of Moscow's plans for a flashy World War II victory commemoration.
As intense fighting continued, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the death toll in Saturday's Russian air strike on a school in the eastern village of Bilogorivka. That would be one of the highest one-day tolls since Russia invaded on February 24.
Russian President Vladimir Putin leads commemorations Monday of the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany, but Ukraine, under unrelenting attack, is desperate to deny Moscow any sense of military invigoration.
Putin is expected to flaunt Russia's military might during the symbolically important event. Huge intercontinental ballistic missiles will be towed for official review through Moscow's Red Square, and a planned flyover will feature fighter jets in a "Z" formation showing support for the war.
The Victory Day parade is a longtime tradition in Russia, but Monday's has taken on great prominence as Putin seeks to justify a war that has gone on far longer — and at far higher cost — than expected.
Putin has sought to legitimise the invasion by comparing it with the previous struggle against Nazism and the national pride it brought.
"Today, our soldiers, as their ancestors, are fighting side by side to liberate their native land from the Nazi filth with the confidence that, as in 1945, victory will be ours," Putin said.
Zelensky also marked the end of the 1939-1945 war by comparing Ukraine's battle for national survival to the region's war of resistance against its former Nazi occupiers.
"Decades after World War II, darkness has returned to Ukraine, and it has become black and white again," he said, in a monochrome social media video shot before a bombed-out apartment block.
Zelensky said later in his nightly video address that the school attack showed "Russia has forgotten everything that was important to the victors of World War II."
New visits, fresh sanctions
In the latest shows of Western support, US First Lady Jill Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made unannounced visits to Ukraine, and G7 leaders joined Zelensky on a video call before pledging new backing — including a key vow to ban or phase out imports of Russian oil.
Britain announced more sanctions against Russia — import tariffs on precious metals and export bans.
After Zelensky's video conference with G7 leaders, the group — comprising Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- said in a statement that Putin's "unprovoked war of aggression" had brought "shame on Russia and the historic sacrifices of its people".
The White House said the G7 was "committed to phasing out or banning the import of Russian oil".
But EU diplomats will meet again next week to hammer out details of their latest sanctions package, after a proposed embargo on Russian oil exposed rifts in the bloc.
Separately, the White House said the United States would slap sanctions on three major Russian television stations and deny all Russian companies access to US firms' consulting and accounting services.
First Lady Biden met her Ukrainian counterpart Olena Zelenska at a school sheltering civilians, including children displaced by the conflict, near Ukraine's border with Slovakia.
"I wanted to come on Mother's Day," Jill Biden told reporters, saying she sought to demonstrate US support for Ukraine.
Tunnel network
Meanwhile, depleted Ukrainian forces are bracing to defend their final bastion in the devastated port city of Mariupol.
Civilians have now been evacuated from Mariupol's Azovstal steelworks, witnesses said.
An AFP reporter in the city of Zaporizhzhia said Sunday that eight buses carrying 174 civilians — including 40 evacuated from Azovstal — had arrived in that Ukrainian-controlled city.
"The latest information that I have from both Ukraine and Russia is that there are no more civilians there (Azovstal), but we are not in a position to verify. We weren't inside the plant," Osnat Lubrani, the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, told AFP.
More than 600 civilians have now been safely evacuated from the steelworks and other areas of Mariupol, the UN said.
This leaves a small force of defenders holed up in Azovstal's sprawling network of tunnels and bunkers.
"We hoped everyday for an evacuation," said Vladymyr Babeush, 41, an Azovstal evacuee who worked at the plant and was among those who arrived in Zaporizhzhia. "And now we are done waiting. We're so thankful to everyone involved."
"I'm very tired. I was in the bus for about 17 hours. But I feel happy because there's fresh air and I'm in Ukraine," said 17-year-old Azovstal evacuee Dmytro, who was wearing one of the plant's workers uniforms.
The complex — the final pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the city — has taken on symbolic value.
Full control of Mariupol would allow Moscow to create a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and eastern regions run by pro-Russian separatists.
In one of those regions, Lugansk, Ukrainian forces are now mounting a last-ditch defence of Severodonetsk, formerly an industrial city of 100,000 people.
Lugansk region governor Sergiy Gaiday said rescuers in Bilogorivka were searching for survivors in the debris left by the Russian attack on the school there, though the outlook was bleak.
"Bombs fell on the school," he said on Telegram, "and unfortunately it was completely destroyed."
'Filtration camps'
Civilians who escaped Mariupol describe passing through Russian "filtration" sites where several evacuees told AFP they were questioned, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and had their phones and documents checked.
"They asked us if we wanted to go to Russia... or stay and rebuild the city of Mariupol," said Azovstal evacuee Natalia, who asked that her full name not be published.
"But how can I rebuild it? How can I return there if the city of Mariupol doesn't exist anymore?"
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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