Seven bodies found after Russian air strike hits school, Ukraine claims

Seven bodies have been found in the rubble of a school building in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine after it was hit in a Russian air strike.

Three wounded people had been pulled out of the rubble, the Ukrainian emergencies service said in a statement on Tuesday. Rescue and recovery work at the site is now finished, it said.

It is not yet clear if there have been any fatalities from the air strike that hit the building on Sunday morning.

Mykolaiv has come under sustained shelling in recent days, but the governor of the region said on Tuesday that the security situation was now calmer because Russian forces had been pushed back slightly from the regional capital.

In an interview on national television, governor Vitaliy Kim said Russian troops continued to fire at the city of Mykolayiv and that 80 people were wounded on Monday, including two children.

He said: “You can be 99% sure that Mykolayiv region will continue to hold back the advance of the Russian troops.

“There is the Bug River, which they need to force their way across in order to advance. We will not give up the bridges to the invaders.”

Meanwhile, Russian forces stepped up their bombing of Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, causing untold damage to homes and other buildings.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the barrages hit four multi-story buildings in the city and killed dozens of people. The shelling also ignited a huge fire in a 15-story apartment building, prompting an emergency rescue operation.

Mr Zelensnky also said on Tuesday that Ukraine must accept it will never be allowed to join Nato.

Speaking to representatives of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), he said that “we heard for years about the allegedly open doors” of NATO, but “we have already heard that we won’t be able to join.”

He added that “it’s the truth we must recognise, and I’m glad that our people are starting to realise that and count on themselves and our partners who are helping us.”

The Ukrainian president also reiterated his calls for Western allies to provide Ukraine with warplanes and warned other European countries that they could also be targeted by Russia.

In other developments, Mariupol officials say 2,000 civilian cars have managed to leave the besieged Ukrainian port city via a humanitarian corridor leading west.

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Additional reporting by Reuters