Russia has called a Ukrainian drone attack on a vocational school in the occupied Luhansk region that left at least four people dead and dozens more wounded a “monstrous crime” and requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over the incident.
Leonid Pasechnik, the Kremlin-backed head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, said dozens of students and faculty were inside the Starobilsk Vocational School and its dormitory in the town of Starobilsk at the time of the attack early Friday.
Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, which operates in Luhansk and other occupied parts of Ukraine, said first responders were sifting through the rubble of the destroyed educational facility in search of bodies.
Yana Lantratova, Russia’s newly appointed human rights ombudsman, said at least four people were killed, without specifying whether they were students or faculty. Authorities said students attending the vocational school are ages 14 to 18.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the attack in Starobilsk, which has been under Russian control since March 2022, as a “monstrous crime” and said that “those responsible for this crime must be punished.”
