Lithuania summoned a Russian diplomat today over a bombed school in Ukraine. Nine months after an American missile killed some 120 children at a school in Minab, IBN could find no record of any European government doing the same to Washington.
On Monday, a school in Komyshuvakha, a village in Zaporizhzhia roughly 20 kilometres from the front, was hit. According to Ukrainian officials, it had long stopped holding lessons and served as a weekly aid distribution point, and both the building and the shelter beneath it were struck; by Wednesday they put the toll at 37 dead and 59 missing. Russia's Defence Ministry gives a different account: its strike, it says, targeted Ukrainian military units in and around the village. Neither version has been independently verified, and both sides deny targeting civilians.
Lithuania did not wait for an investigation. This morning its foreign ministry summoned a representative of the Russian embassy in Vilnius, and its message on X was blunt: "Deadly strikes on trains, schools and shelters are war crimes."
Fine. Take Vilnius at its word. If striking a school full of civilians is a war crime, that is a rule, and rules don't carry passports. Note too what Vilnius treated as enough to act on: Kyiv's account of a strike Moscow disputes.
Now apply that rule to 28 February, a case where the attacker's own military has already admitted the missile was its own.
Saturday is the first day of the school week in Iran. On 28 February, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab was hit. Iran's education ministry said 168 people from the school were killed. Amnesty International counted 156 dead, more than 120 of them children.
For a while, Washington's line was that nobody knew. On 9 March, asked about a Tomahawk hitting the school, President Trump suggested it could have been "Iran or somebody else." Two days later, preliminary findings of the Pentagon's own inquiry leaked: the missile was American, and it was fired using outdated targeting data. NPR's review of satellite imagery showed the school had been walled off from a neighbouring Revolutionary Guard compound sometime between 2013 and 2016. The building had been a school for a decade.
On 17 September, the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed a war crime in Minab, calling the school a clearly identifiable civilian object with no sign of military use. The State Department said it gave the report no credibility. The Pentagon has still not published its findings; Bloomberg reported last month that officials intend to hold them until after the US midterms.
An eleven-year-old survivor told PBS the whole building swayed when the missile hit. Parents in Minab buried many of their daughters together.
Summoning an ambassador is the cheapest tool in diplomacy. It costs a car ride and an uncomfortable half hour. Europe uses it on Russia constantly. In May, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and the EU itself called in Russia's envoys over threats against diplomats in Kyiv. In September, the EU, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Portugal did it again over a drone attack at Leipzig airport that Berlin blamed on Moscow.
Europe is not shy with American ambassadors either. In February, France summoned US Ambassador Charles Kushner because the State Department had posted comments blaming left-wing militants for the death of a French far-right activist. When Kushner didn't show up, Paris cut his access to ministers.
A summons over a tweet. And for 120 schoolgirls?
I searched the statements of European foreign ministries since February. I could not find a single summons of a US ambassador over Minab. What I did find: three days into the war, Germany summoned Iran's ambassador to demand Tehran stop its retaliatory strikes on the region. Iran's embassy in London later accused EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas of staying silent on Minab. That is Tehran's accusation, and Tehran has its own reasons to make it. It is also, as far as the public record shows, accurate.
Gaza's Health Ministry counted 74,594 people killed as of 31 October, with more than 175,000 wounded. Those figures have historically come close to later UN and independent counts. Since the ceasefire of October 2025, the ministry says another 1,580 people have been killed, 143 of them last month alone. A ceasefire, in other words, that kills around five people a day.
In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Israel rejects that finding. You can argue about the word. You cannot argue that European governments have treated it the way they treat Russian conduct in Ukraine: no common sanctions regime built around it, no wave of coordinated summonses, no exclusion. A few governments broke ranks. Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez said a year ago that neither Russia nor Israel should be in any international competition. He remained the exception.
Here is a date worth remembering. On 28 February 2022, FIFA and UEFA suspended all Russian teams, national and club, "until further notice." On 28 February 2026, four years to the day, the Minab school was hit.
Russia is still suspended. Israel still plays in UEFA competitions; UEFA's only measure has been to keep matches off Israeli soil, citing security. At the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February, 13 Russian athletes were allowed to compete, without flag, anthem or team sports, and only after vetting. The IOC said it had never even discussed banning Israel. When five broadcasters, from Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Iceland, refused to take part in Eurovision 2026 over Israel's participation, the contest went ahead with Israel and without them. Russia was thrown out of Eurovision in 2022.
And this summer, the United States hosted the World Cup, months after its missile flattened a girls' school. FIFA president Gianni Infantino had already handed Donald Trump FIFA's new peace prize, and argued that banning countries achieves nothing except more frustration and hatred.
The governing bodies do have an explanation, and it is worth hearing. The 2022 Russia ban followed a wave of European federations refusing to play Russian teams; UEFA called it unworkable. The IOC says Russia broke the Olympic Charter by absorbing sports bodies in annexed Ukrainian regions, and violated the Olympic Truce. Israel's defenders say its federations have broken no sporting rule.
But look at what that explanation admits. The deciding factor was never what a country does to civilians. It was whether enough powerful federations refused to play it. Which is another way of saying: it depends who your friends are.
Infantino can't have it both ways. If bans achieve nothing, Russia should be back. If they mean something, they should mean the same thing for everyone.
The official reason for bombing Iran, twice in nine months, was the bomb Iran was supposedly about to build. The UN's own nuclear watchdog has never said that.
Days after the February strikes, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi wrote that there has been "no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb." He said the same thing in June 2025, the first time Iran was bombed. In March 2025, Trump's own intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress the US intelligence community assessed that Iran was not building one.
Grossi is no Tehran apologist, and honesty requires quoting the rest. He also called Iran's large stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium and its refusal to give inspectors full access a cause for serious concern, and said the IAEA cannot vouch that the programme is entirely peaceful. Those are real problems. They are problems for inspectors and negotiators. They are not evidence of a bomb, and they are not a licence for a war launched, as Iran's UN envoy pointed out, while talks were under way.
Meanwhile, Israel has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, does not allow IAEA inspectors into its Dimona reactor, and holds an estimated 90 nuclear warheads according to Stockholm's SIPRI. Iran, a treaty member under inspection, was bombed on suspicion. Israel, outside the treaty, is not even asked the question.
None of this means Komyshuvakha should be waved away. It deserves exactly what Minab deserves: an independent investigation that tests Kyiv's account and Moscow's denial with the same rigour. And none of it makes Tehran innocent: the same UN mission that found grounds for a US war crime in Minab found that Iran's government committed crimes against humanity in crushing protests last winter. Good. That is what a single standard looks like. It hits everyone.
What I object to is not that Europe asks questions of Russia. It is that the questions stop at the border of an alliance. In one case, Europe acted on a disputed account within days. In the other, the attacker's own investigators confirmed responsibility, and Europe said nothing. The girls in Minab and the people queuing for aid in Komyshuvakha died the same way, under a collapsing building. The international law Europe cites so often was written precisely so that the identity of whoever fired would not matter.
A summons costs nothing. That is exactly why its absence says so much. A principle you only apply to your opponents isn't a principle. It's a weapon.
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