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KYIV, Ukraine: Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of killing four people in a strike on a boarding school sheltering civilians in the Kursk region town of Sudzha, which Kyiv has occupied for over five months.
Kyiv launched a surprise cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk region last August, seizing dozens of villages and small towns including the regional hub of Sudzha — home to about 6,000 people before the fighting.
“Russian aviation struck a boarding school in the town of Sudzha, Kursk region, with a guided aerial bomb,” the Ukrainian army’s general staff said on Telegram.
“The strike was carried out on purpose,” it added.
It said “dozens of local residents were inside the building preparing to evacuate” at the time of the attack, and that rescue work was under way.
“In the course of the rubble removal works, 84 civilians were rescued and provided with medical aid, their health condition is satisfactory, four are in serious condition, and four people died,” it said in a later post.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of striking its “own civilians” in the town. He shared a video on social media showing a heavily damaged building, as well as an wounded man lying on the ground.
“They destroyed the building even though dozens of civilians were there,” Zelensky said in a post on X. “Russian bombs destroy Ukrainian homes the same way. And even against their own civilians, the Russian army uses similar tactics.”
Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, spokesman for Ukraine’s military command in the region, said most of those inside the building were elderly.
AFP was not able to immediately verify Ukraine’s claim, and Russian officials made no immediate public comments on Kyiv’s accusation.
Thousands of Russian civilians are thought to be trapped by fighting in the border region.
A Russian official in Kursk told AFP last week that authorities were working “constantly” to secure the return of Russian civilians caught behind the front lines.

SHENGJIN: Dozens of migrants left Albania in Italian custody on Saturday after a ruling by judges in Rome struck a fresh blow to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s embattled third-country migration centers.
According to an AFP reporter, an Italian boat carrying 43 migrants departed from the Albanian port of Shengjin just after midday on Saturday.
The migrants arrived in Albania on Tuesday, following an earlier months-long pause in the scheme. Several were sent back the same day, while dozens remained.
On Friday, Rome’s Court of Appeals referred the case to the European Court of Justice, or ECJ, meaning the 43 migrants in Albania had to be transferred to Italy, said a government source.
Meloni’s plan to outsource migrant processing to a non-EU country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers is being followed closely by other European nations.
The plan, heavily criticized by rights groups and opposition parties in Italy, has run into repeated blocks, and the ECJ is examining legal questions raised by several Italian courts.
The migrants sent to Albania were among a group intercepted by Italian authorities as they tried to cross the Mediterranean.
Most hailed from Bangladesh, while there were also six Egyptians, one man from Ivory Coast and one from Gambia, said rights associations.
Meloni signed a deal with Albanian counterpart Edi Rama in November 2023 to open two Italian-run centers in Albania.
The centers became operational in October, but after judges ruled against the detentions of the first two groups of men transferred there, they were instead sent to Italy.
Like many other countries, Italy has a list of so-called safe countries from which asylum seekers can have their applications fast-tracked.
The judges who blocked the first transfer of migrants cited an ECJ ruling stipulating that EU states can only designate entire countries as safe, not parts of countries.
Italy’s list included some countries with unsafe areas.
In response, Meloni’s government passed a law cutting its safe list to 19 countries from 22 — and insisting all parts of those nations were safe.
But judges ruled against a second transfer of migrants — seven men from Egypt and Bangladesh — saying they wanted clarification from the ECJ.
According to Italian media, an ECJ hearing has been provisionally set for February.