At least seven people were killed and 27 injured following an attack on civilian evacuation buses in the town of Borova, in the Kharkov region, which authorities have attributed to Russian forces.
As reported on Friday by the Kharkiv regional prosecutor's office on Telegram, the attack took place on Thursday. According to local residents quoted by the Ukrinform news agency, the bus drivers, seeing the Russian troops, stopped so that people could get out of the vehicles “with their hands up”, but fired at them.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has already launched an investigation to clarify whether what happened constitutes a violation of the laws of war and premeditated murder, under the Ukrainian Criminal Code.
On 4 April, the Ukrainian authorities urged residents of Borova to leave the city by their own means or on buses equipped for this purpose. Since then, half of the local residents, 15,000 in total, have left there.
On Thursday morning, Russian troops entered a village near Borova and, in the evening, the Ukrainian authorities confirmed that they had also gained access to Borova. The town was blocked, according to the Ukrainian press.
Not counting Thursday's fatalities, the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Sinegoubov, said that more than 500 civilians, including 24 children, have died since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
“Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, 503 civilians, including 24 children, have died,” the governor of the region, whose capital, Kharkiv, was heavily bombed by the Russian army, said in a video posted on his Telegram channel.
Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, with a population of almost 1.5 million inhabitants before the war, is located about 40 kilometers from the Russian border. It was the subject of intense fighting for several days at the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February, but it has always remained under the control of Ukrainian forces.
(With information from Europa Press, AFP and EFE)
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