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Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that Russia’s military bombed an art school sheltering some 400 people in the embattled port city of Mariupol, where Ukraine’s president said an unrelenting Russian siege would be remembered for centuries to come, Associated Press reported.

It was the second time in less than a week that city officials reported a public building where residents had taken shelter coming under attack. A bomb hit a Mariupol theater with more than 1,300 believed to be inside on Wednesday, local officials said. 

There was no immediate word on casualties from the reported strike on the art school, which The Associated Press could not independently verify. Ukrainian officials have not given an update on the search of the theater since Friday, when they said at least 130 had been rescued. 

Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been under bombardment for at least three weeks and has seen some of the worst horrorsof the war in Ukraine. At least 2,300 people have died, some of whom had to be buried in mass graves, and food, water and electricity have run low.

“To do this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers did, is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation. “The more Russia uses terror against Ukraine, the worse the consequences for it.”

In recent days, Russian forces have battled their way into the city, cutting it off from the Azov Sea and devastating a massive steel plant. The fall of Mariupol would be an important but costly victory for the Russians, whose advance is largely stalled outside other major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II, according to the Associated Press.

In major cities across Ukraine, hundreds of men, women and children have been killed in Russian bombardments, while millions of civilians have raced to underground shelters or fled the country.

In the capital, Kyiv, at least 20 babies carried by Ukrainian surrogate mothers are stuck in a makeshift bomb shelter, waiting for parents to travel into the war zone to pick them up. The infants — some just days old — are being cared for by nurses who cannot leave the shelter because of constant shelling by Russian troops who are trying to encircle the city.

In the hard-hit northeastern city of Sumy, authorities evacuated 71 orphaned babies through a humanitarian corridor, regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said Sunday. He said the orphans, most of whom need constant medical attention, would be taken to an unspecified foreign country, Associated Press reported.

Russian shelling killed at least five civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, in Kharkiv, an eastern city that is Ukraine’s second-largest.

The British Defense Ministry said Russia’s failure to gain control of the skies over Ukraine “has significantly blunted their operational progress,” forcing them to rely on stand-off weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace.

A rocket attack on the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv early Friday killed as many as 40 marines, a Ukrainian military official told The New York Times, making it one of the deadliest single attacks on Ukrainian forces.

In a separate strike, the Russian Defense Ministry said a Kinzhal hypersonic missile hit a Ukrainian fuel depot in Kostiantynivka, a city near Mykolaiv. The Russian military said Saturday that it used a Kinzhal for the first time in combat to destroy an ammunition depot in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, according to the Associated Press.

Nepali Congress said that the meeting of the Central Working Committee will decide whether to forge alliance with the parties of ruling alliance in the local level elections.

Party President and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has called the meeting of the Central Working Committee at the party’s central office for 2 pm on Friday.

Party spokesperson Prakash Sharan Mahat said that the meeting would decide whether to forge an electoral alliance or not.

“The meeting will decide whether or not to forge an electoral alliance,” Mahat said. “All the parties’ objective is to win more seats in the elections,” he further said.

Saying that the party leaders and cadres have been indulging in the debate whether or not to forge the electoral alliance, he said that there is no need to engage in such a debate.

He said that the party leaders have differing views on whether to forge alliance with the parties of ruling alliance or not.

But, Prime Minister Deuba has already told CPN (Maoist Centre) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal and CPN (Unified Socialist) Chairman Madhav Nepal that he would take the decision whether or not to forge an electoral alliance by holding discussions with the party leaders.

Nepali Congress spokesperson Prakash Sharan Mahat said that the party would finalize the names of candidates for the upcoming local level elections by mid-April.

Speaking at a press conference organized in Salyan on Sunday, Mahat said that the party would finalize the names of candidates for the forthcoming local polls by mid-April.

He said that the party has formed parliamentary committees at the central, state, district and municipal levels to decide the candidates to be fielded by the party at various levels.

Leader Mahat said that the centre would look into any dispute that could not be resolved by the party’s lower level committee.

Meanwhile, Mahat also made public the general criteria of the candidates of local level.

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Saturday that at least 847 civilians had been killed and 1,399 wounded in Ukraine as of March 18, Reuters reported.

Most of the casualties were from explosive weapons such as shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes, OHCHR said.

The real toll is thought to be considerably higher since OHCHR, which has a large monitoring team in the country, has not yet been able to verify casualty reports from several badly hit cities, it said, according to Reuters.