Mariupol school bombed, thousands deported from besieged city

The Russian military has bombed an art school in besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol where about 400 people had taken refuge, news agency AP quoted local authorities as saying, Sunday   

The authorities added that the building was destroyed and people could remain under the debris. There was no immediate word on casualties, the report added.  

Local authorities said thousands of residents there had been taken by force across the border. “Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported onto the Russian territory,” the city council said in a statement on Saturday.  

Russian news agencies have said buses have carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from Mariupol to Russia in recent days.  

Rescue workers were still searching for survivors in a Mariupol theatre that local authorities say was flattened by Russian air strikes on Wednesday. Russia denies hitting the theatre.   

Many of Mariupol’s 400,000 residents have been trapped for more than two weeks as Russia seeks to take control of the city, which would help secure a land corridor to the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine 
in 2014.  

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Russia’s siege of the port city “a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come”  

Russian president Vladimir Putin calls the attack on Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24, a “special operation” to demilitarize the country and root out people he terms dangerous nationalists. Western nations call it an aggressive war of choice and have imposed punishing sanctions aimed at crippling Russia’s economy.  
Ukraine March 20 (Reuters/Hindustan Times)