Russia has destroyed a school donated by Finland in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian media reports.
On Saturday, the English-language news site Euromaidan Press posted a video credited to Kherson authorities, showing the badly destroyed building.
The energy-efficient school with solar panels on its roof was built in 2016, two years after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, just southeast of Kherson.
Then-minister of foreign trade and development Kai Mykkänen (NCP) attended the building’s inauguration in September of that year. He is now environment minister.
A Finnish government press release at the time noted that the Kherson region had "seen a flood of refugees from eastern Ukraine and Crimea following the Ukrainian crisis".
It said that the school was built with Finnish development cooperation funds, with the project carried out by the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation (Nefco) and the Finnish modular construction firm Elemenco.
"Finland has been providing support to Ukraine (a total of €24 million) since the conflict there began in 2014, including humanitarian and development cooperation aid and expertise. The school project, worth a total of €2.75 million, was Finland’s largest single effort in Ukraine," the government said eight years ago.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Finland has provided some 2.2 billion euros in defence aid to Kyiv, along with about 38 million euros in humanitarian assistance as of the end of last year. Most of that support has been channelled through the UN, the Red Cross and the World Food Programme (WFP).