DONETSK (Reuters) – Flames engulfed a university building’s wooden roof in Donetsk following Ukrainian shelling, said an emergency official in the Russia-controlled city in eastern Ukraine.

“As a result of the latest attack on Donetsk, the first building of the University of Economics and Trade is on fire,” Alexei Kulemzin, the mayor, said on Telegram.

“We are using 12 water tanks, three ladders and 100 fire fighters,” said Alexei Kostrubitsky, the emergency minister for the region that Moscow calls the Donetsk People’s Republic.

“The whole roof is on fire.”

Kostrubitsky said Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions in the shelling that caused the blaze. Reuters could not independently verify the information. 

Ukraine, which received supplies of U.S. cluster munitions last month, has vowed to use them only to dislodge concentrations of enemy soldiers.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday suggested Moscow would launch more strikes against Ukrainian ports in response to Kyiv’s attacks on Russian ships in the Black Sea, and threatened to hand Ukraine “an ecological catastrophe”.

Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, a body chaired by President Vladimir Putin, spoke after Ukrainian sea drone attacks on a Russian warship in the port of Novorossiysk, and against a tanker near Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Putin chaired a meeting of the Security Council on Friday which Medvedev attended following the attack on Novorossiysk, in which the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a Russian Navy landing ship, was reported to have been badly damaged.

“Freaks understand only cruelty and force. Apparently, the strikes on Odesa, Izmail, and other places were not enough for them,” Medvedev said in a post on his official social media accounts.

Russia has in recent weeks targeted the Black Sea port of Odesa, where the Ukrainian Navy is headquartered, and Izmail, Ukraine’s main inland port across the Danube River from Romania, damaging port infrastructure and grain facilities.

 

‘Western Bid to Get Global South doomed’

 

Moscow said on Sunday that weekend talks in Saudi Arabia including the U.S., China and India aiming to establish principles for a peaceful end to Russia’s war in Ukraine were a doomed Western attempt to align the Global South behind Kyiv.

Senior officials from some 40 countries were attending the two-day meeting, part of a push by Ukraine to build support beyond its core Western backers among countries that have been reluctant to take sides in the conflict. Russia was not invited.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted by the state news agency TASS calling the meeting “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts to mobilize the international community, and more precisely, the Global South, even if not entirely, in support of the so-called Zelenskyi formula, which is doomed and untenable from the outset”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday he hoped the initiative would lead to a peace summit of leaders from around the world this autumn to endorse principles for a settlement based on his own 10-point formula.