Russian shelling kills 5 in Ukraine

Russian shelling and aerial bomb attacks killed at least five civilians in frontline Ukrainian regions Thursday, officials said.

As Ukraine continues a major cross-border offensive in the north, a Russian attack killed two people in the northern Sumy region, the head of the regional military administration said.

Guided aerial bombs killed a 22-year-old man and his six-year-old sister in a school playground in the border village of Mogritsya, Volodymyr Artiukh said on national television.

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In the eastern Donetsk region, “two people were killed by shelling” in  Kostyantinivka, near the battleground town of Chasiv Yar, said the head of the region’s military administration, Vadym Filashkin.

He said artillery attacks had hit private houses and posted a picture of shrapnel holes through a garden wall.

In the southeastern city of Nikopol, located on the Dnipro River across from Russian-controlled areas, Russians “aimed artillery at a hospital”, killing a 50-year-old man, said Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration chief Sergiy Lysak.

Ukraine’s police said they were evacuating children from the most dangerous areas of the Donetsk region, and had brought out over 1,000 in three days, with 3,723 more needing to be moved.

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Pavlo Dyachenko, head of communications for Donetsk regional police, said that 756 families with 1,010 children were evacuated.

In a video released by police, an officer driving an evacuation vehicle with a cracked windscreen past a house hit by shelling said: “Yesterday we brought out people. Today their house isn’t there any more, it’s burnt down.”

According to the video, children from 28 settlements in various districts were to be evacuated.

It showed children being dressed in body armour and helmets before boarding  vehicles.

© Agence France-Presse