Kiev committed ‘war crime’ in occupied Russian town – MOD
Ukrainian forces have committed a “war crime” by launching a targeted missile attack against a boarding school in the city of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk Region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.
Russian air defenses detected missiles fired from Ukraine’s Sumy Region towards Sudzha on Saturday, according to the ministry.
“This provocation is aimed at diverting global attention from the atrocities committed by the Kiev regime in the village of Russkoye Porechnoye, Kursk Region,” the Defense ministry stated.
The strike on the civilian facility “once again demonstrated the terrorist, inhuman nature of those in power in Kiev,” the statement added.
Dozens of civilians were reportedly sheltering inside the targeted facility, but there is no reliable information yet on the number of casualties, according to Kursk Region’s acting governor, Aleksandr Khinstein.
“In any case, a rocket attack on a boarding school where civilians could be hiding is a crime that has no forgiveness and no statute of limitations,” Khinstein wrote in a post on Telegram, adding that the “inhuman brutality of the Kiev regime cannot be justified.”
Moscow previously accused Kiev of turning the boarding school in Sudzha into one of its “Nazi-style concentration camps” and repeatedly sought to draw international attention to the issue.
“We have ample evidence of ‘concentration camps’ being set up in a number of settlements controlled by militants… between 70 and 100 civilians were ‘herded’ into the basements of the boarding school in Sudzha, where they were harassed and subjected to violence,” Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the Security Council in September.
Rodion Miroshnik, a senior diplomat tasked by the Foreign Ministry with documenting alleged Ukrainian atrocities, delivered a similar warning in his report to the OSCE, adding that Russian civilians “were subjected to psychological abuse and used for filming propaganda stories by Ukrainian and foreign journalists.”
Kiev launched its incursion into the Russian region on August 6, seizing some territory but failing to advance deeper. The town of Sudzha, home to some 5,000 people, was arguably the biggest prize for the thousands of Kiev’s best-trained troops armed with Western equipment. Since taking the settlement, a number of press tours for foreign outlets have been organized, with reporting focused on Russian civilians who could not evacuate from the war zone in time.
Earlier this month, Russian forces liberated another Kursk Region settlement, Russkoye Porechnoye, 10km north of the still-occupied Sudzha, where they discovered multiple decomposing corpses of civilians stashed in basements throughout the village.
On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee released new evidence on the massacre, including footage of the interrogation of one of the suspected perpetrators. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the videos released by the investigators “impossible to watch,” and condemned the perpetrators for deliberately targeting vulnerable people.
“What kind of inhuman being tortures elderly civilians, beats them, injures them, and then blows them up with grenades?” she asked, referring to the forensic evidence uncovered in the village. “The world must understand who the Westerners are sponsoring and that with Western money, with these hundreds of billions of dollars and euros, the Kiev regime is committing these atrocities, which testify to its neo-Nazi nature.”
The Defense Ministry said that the latest Ukrainian provocation in Sudzha “is aimed at distracting attention from the atrocities of the Kiev regime in the Kursk settlement of Russian Porechnoye.”
