Russian forces have shelled a school building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, leaving three dead, according to Ukraine’s authorities.
The school was destroyed in the attack, video footage shows, and 85 residential buildings were damaged, said Ukraine’s presidential office.
The reported deaths come as Moscow’s forces edge towards the city, the de facto regional capital of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, after Russia’s proxy forces occupied half the region in 2014.
“Russian strikes on schools and hospitals are very painful and reflect its true goal of reducing peaceful cities to ruins,” Donetsk’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in televised remarks, repeating his call on residents to evacuate.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv was hit with a barrage of shells which killed at least three people and wounded 23 others.
Russia’s ministry of defence called for its forces last week to step up their offensive to take Ukraine’s Donbas region, a term for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian forces now occupy about 75% of the Donbas region.
A spokesperson for Russia’s ministry of defence, Igor Konashenkov, claimed the attack on Kramatorsk had killed 300 Ukrainian soldiers using the school as their base. Konashenkov did not present evidence to back up his claim.
It is unclear who died in the Kramatorsk attack. Ukrainian schools closed when the invasion began and children have been learning from home. Guardian journalists have seen evidence that Ukrainian forces use schools as bases. However, some schools visited by the Guardian had been repurposed for civilian purposes, such as humanitarian aid or social services.
Russian forces made a similar claim after their attack in Chasiv Yar, a town just north of Kramatorsk in Donetsk region, where 48 people died. Russia said they killed “300 nationalists” in the attack.
Guardian journalists who visited Chasiv Yar were told by residents that one of the residential buildings had housed Ukrainian soldiers but it was unclear how many had lived there. Local residents were also killed in the attack, including a nine-year-old boy.
Ukraine’s ministry of education said as of 2 June at least 1,888 schools and nurseries had been destroyed since the invasion. It has not provided an updated figure since then.
In the Dnipro region of central Ukraine, three schools were destroyed in the latest Russian strikes, Ukrainian authorities said. Seven Russian missiles hit the small town of Apostolove in the Dnipro region, wounding 18 residents.
Regional governor Valentyn Reznichenko decried the “senseless” attack, saying that “there are no military goals behind it and this shelling could only be explained by their desire to keep people on edge and sow panic and fear.”
