Three dozen others in the Russian city will be closed down for a week due to Kiev’s attacks, Vyacheslav Gladkov has said
A kindergarten was irreparably destroyed in a large-scale Ukrainian shelling of the Russian city of Belgorod overnight, local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has said. Following the attack, a decision was made to close dozens of others and transfer some local schools to remote learning, he added.
At least 11 civilians, including two children, were wounded in Ukrainian strikes targeting various parts of the city, Gladkov wrote on Telegram on Monday morning. Nine of the victims required hospitalization, with five of them being in serious condition, he added.
“It is not a good morning here in Belgorod Region. There has been another shelling of Belgorod. The missiles made it through. A kindergarten in Belgorod has been almost completely destroyed,” the governor wrote in a post on Russia’s VK social network.
It is the third educational institution in the city to have suffered significant damage as a result of Ukrainian attacks, following previous hits on another kindergarten and a school, he said.
A decision was made to shut down three dozen kindergartens for a week in the city district of Kharkovskaya Gora, located in the south of Belgorod, closest to the Russian-Ukrainian border, Gladkov announced.
Almost two dozen schools in the area would also switch to remote learning, he added. This Monday, September 2, is the day when the school year begins in Russia. Children typically attend kindergartens for several years, before entering the first grade at about age 7.
The governor acknowledged that working parents might be unhappy about the closure of the preschools, but stressed that protecting the lives of the children was a priority.
Gladkov said that he had already visited the affected kindergarten, adding that if the strike had occurred during the day when the children were inside, “no one would have had a chance to survive.”
Around a dozen communities across Belgorod Region also came under Ukrainian shelling and drone attacks during the night. One person was killed in the village of Shagarovka, with at least six more civilians being wounded in other locations, including the town of Shebekino, according to the governor.
The Russian regions of Belgorod, Kursk and Bryansk, which all border Ukraine, have been a frequent target of cross-border attacks since February 2022. However, the bombardment of Belgorod has intensified over the past few weeks amid the stalling of the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk Region and Russian advances in Donbass.
On Friday, five civilians were killed and 37 were wounded in a Ukrainian missile strike on Belgorod. On August 25, five people lost their lives and 13 more suffered injuries as a result of a Ukrainian attack on the town of Rakitnoe.
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