What happened in Ukrain ?
What do we know about the shelling of a school in the Donbass region ?
A shell hit a kindergarten in a small town on the outskirts of Lugansk, in the east of Ukrain. Fortunately no one was killed in the explosion..
While Russia announced on Tuesday the partial withdrawal of its troops deployed on the outskirts of Ukraine, without convincing the West, a school in the east of the country was hit by a shell on the morning of Thursday 17 February. The diplomatic crisis around Ukraine is becoming more tense every day. On one side, the pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, as well as 100,000 Russian soldiers deployed near the border; on the other, the Ukrainian government, supported in particular by the United States.
3 Peoples Injured during the attack ..
On Thursday, February 17, 8:45 a.m., a shell ripped through the wall of a kindergarten in Stanitsa Luganska, a small town of 12,000 inhabitants in eastern Donbass. This region bordering Russia has been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. Stanitsa Louganska is located precisely on the contact line between the pro-Russian separatist regions and the rest of Ukraine. About 20 children were present in the school, but they were having breakfast on the floor. The Ukrainian police released a video of their evacuation. Three employees were injured, none of the children were physically hurt. No deaths were reported.
Both sides blame each other
In a statement issued on Thursday evening, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense considered Russia "responsible for the situation in the temporarily occupied territories. "Any damage that may be caused to people or infrastructure in the temporarily occupied territories is a provocation," it said, while Ukraine's actions "are purely defensive". For their part, the Lugansk separatists have accused Kiev of being responsible for an increase in the number of bombings to "push the conflict towards an escalation", explained AFP on Friday. The Kremlin considered that the "extreme concentration of Ukrainian forces" was responsible for this "extremely dangerous" situation.
A pretext for intervention ?
The attacks are numerous. But in the case of the strike on the school of Stanitsa Louganska, "very symbolic", it "could be the beginning of a spiral that would lead to a total war", says Maryse Burgot, of France 2.
Russia has expressed its "deep concern", without stopping its negotiations. The Kremlin has unrolled once again on Thursday the catalog of its strategic demands to the West, which have for the most part already rejected them. Moscow demands in particular a "renunciation of any future enlargement of Nato", in particular to Ukraine. In case of refusal, "Russia will be forced to react, including through the implementation of measures of a military and technical nature," she threatened. The British and Americans believe that with this attack Moscow could be used as a pretext to intervene in the conflict between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass for eight years. This operation, according to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is "designed to discredit the Ukrainians" and "create a false provocation to justify Russian action. An opinion shared by the American president: Joe Biden repeated on Thursday that Russia was preparing a "false alarm".
Until now absent from the Ukrainian conflict, China joined the debate on Thursday. At the UN Security Council meeting, the Chinese ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun, said: "The constant expansion of Nato, in the wake of the Cold War, goes against our times."
WE WANT PEACE...
