Five people have been killed in a Russian strike on a law school known locally as the “Harry Potter castle” in the southern Ukrainian port of Odesa.
At least 32 others were injured in Monday’s attack, with 23 of them still in hospital on Tuesday.
‘Monsters. Beasts. Savages. Scum. I don’t know what else to say’, Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor of Odesa, said on Telegram. ‘People are going for a walk by the sea and they are shooting and killing’.
Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian navy, said the strike was by an Iskander-M ballistic missile with a cluster warhead.
Oleh Kiper, the regional governor, said that eight of the injured were in serious condition, four in critical condition including a four-year-old child, and another child and a pregnant woman were among the injured.
A student at the academy said: ‘In front of my eyes, a missile was shot down, this was just in front of me. My doors were blown open and the glass was shaking. And then I saw this’.
‘Just before this happened, we wanted to go down there for a walk, but thank God we weren’t there when it happened.’
The missile strike came just hours after Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato chief, made an unannounced visit to Kyiv to say that while Ukraine “has been outgunned for months… it is not too late to prevail” as he rebuked members over delays to military aid.