BILOHORIVKA
\nAs many as 60 people were feared to have been killed in the Russian bombing of a village school in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, the regional governor said on Sunday.
\nGovernor Serhiy Gaidai said Russian forces dropped a bomb on Saturday afternoon on the school in Bilohorivka where about 90 people were sheltering, causing a fire that engulfed the building.
\n\u201cThe fire was extinguished after nearly four hours, then the rubble was cleared, and, unfortunately, the bodies of two people were found,\u201d Gaidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
\n\u201cThirty people were evacuated from the rubble, seven of whom were injured. Sixty people were likely to have died under the rubble of buildings.\u201d
\nReuters could not immediately verify the report.
\nUkraine and its Western allies have accused Russian forces of targeting civilians in the war, which Moscow denies.
\nIn the ruined southeastern port city of Mariupol, scores of civilians have been evacuated from a sprawling steel plant in a week-long operation brokered by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an address late on Saturday that more than 300 civilians had been rescued from the Azovstal steelworks and authorities would now focus on trying to evacuate the wounded and medics. Other Ukrainian sources have cited different figures.
\nRussian-backed separatists on Saturday reported a total of 176 civilians evacuated from the plant.
\nThe Azovstal plant is a last hold-out for Ukrainian forces in the city now largely controlled by Russia, and many civilians had also taken refuges in its underground shelters. It has become a symbol of resistance to the Russian effort to capture swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine.
\nRussian President Vladimir Putin calls the invasion he launched on Feb. 24 a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d to disarm Ukraine and rid it of anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and its allies say Russia launched an unprovoked war.
\nMariupol is key to blocking Ukrainian exports and linking the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Russia in 2014, and parts of the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk that have been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since that same year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BILOHORIVKA As many as 60 people were feared to have been killed in the Russian bombing of a village school in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, the regional governor said on Sunday. Governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russian forces dropped a bomb on Saturday afternoon on the school in Bilohorivka where about 90 people were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[233,338,6951,456],"class_list":{"0":"post-259343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-governor","9":"tag-russia","10":"tag-school-bombed","11":"tag-ukraine"},"yoast_head":"\n