An art school providing shelter for 400 people in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol has been bombed by the Russian military, according to officials.
Local authorities said the building was destroyed and people may be trapped under the rubble. There was no immediate word on casualties.
On Wednesday, Russian forces bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering.
Some 130 people were rescued but many more could remain under the debris.
Mariupol has been relentlessly bombed by Putin’s troops who’ve cut off the cuity’s energy, food and water supplies.
The siege has left at least 2,300 people dead, with many said to be buried in mass graves.
President Zelensky said it will go down in history for ‘war crimes’ committed by Moscow.
‘To do this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers did, is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,’ he said in a video address to the nation.
Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin, speaking from a rubble-strewn street in a video addressed to Western leaders, said: ‘Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth.’
Officials in the city say nearly 40,000 people have fled over the past week – almost 10% of its 430,000 population.
The city council said the 39,426 residents safely evacuated in their own vehicles, using a humanitarian corridor via Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia.
The fall of Mariupol would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since the Second World War.
Meanwhile in the eastern city of Kharkiv, at least five civilians have been killed in the latest Russian shelling.
Police in Ukraine’s second largest city said the victims included a nine-year-old boy.
Kharkiv has been besieged by Russian forces since the start of the invasion and, like Mariupol, has come under a relentless barrage.
