Ukraine president condemns ‘war crime’ air strike on Mariupol maternity hospital

An apparent Russian air strike destroyed a children’s hospital in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol, triggering renewed global outrage as Moscow’s war with its ex-Soviet neighbour entered its third week.

The strike came as Mariupol’s mayor said more than 1,200 civilians had died in a nine-day Russian siege of the southern port of almost half a million, with people left cowering without power or water under a barrage of shelling.

Condemning Wednesday’s hospital attack as a “war crime”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also shared video footage showing massive destruction at the complex, saying a “direct strike by Russian troops” had left children under the wreckage.

He urged the West to impose even tougher sanctions, so Russia “no longer has any possibility to continue this genocide”.

However Russia said the reports were “fake news” as the building was a former maternity hospital that had long been taken over by troops.

At least three people were killed, including a young girl, in the attack, local officials said on Thursday. Officials had previously given a toll of 17 injured in the attack.

International condemnation was swift, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling the attack “depraved” and the White House calling it a “barbaric use of military force to go after innocent civilians”.

“That’s how fake news is born,” Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said on Twitter.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment, said: “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets”. Russia calls its incursion a “special operation” to disarm its neighbour and dislodge leaders it calls “neo-Nazis”.

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A UN spokesman said no health facility “should ever be a target” while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the attack “horrific” in a tweet.

The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on health facilities and ambulances since the fighting began, killing 10 people. It was not clear if that number included the assault on the maternity hospital.

Wednesday’s attack came as women were in labour inside, the regional military administration in Donetsk said.

Videos posted by the regional chief and city authorities showed a woman being evacuated on a stretcher, a huge crater in the hospital yard, branches snapped from trees and burning cars, and cladding ripped from the building’s facade.

The strike in Mariupol took place 14 days after Russian forces entered Ukraine in defiance of the international community – and on the eve of the highest-level talks to date between the two nations.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov landed in Turkey for the face-to-face talks set for Thursday with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba – who warned in a Facebook video his expectations were “limited”.

So far, the parties have been engaged in lower level talks in Belarus, involving Ukrainian officials but no Russian ministers and largely devoted to humanitarian issues.

On that front, the past days have brought some relief to terrified civilians with the opening of evacuation corridors out of bombarded cities, and Russia and Ukraine agreeing Wednesday to open several more.

For the first time the safe routes included Irpin, Bucha and Gostomel, a cluster of towns on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv that have been largely occupied by Russian forces.

A corridor was also agreed for besieged Mariupol, where several previous evacuations have failed.

While Moscow vowed to respect a 12-hour truce to allow civilians to flee via those corridors, its forces have made rapid advances towards the capital, approaching Brovary, a large eastern suburb, AFP journalists saw.

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Fighting has intensified in the area, with Ukrainian forces trying to repel the Russian tanks, residents and volunteers of the Ukrainian forces told AFP.

“They shoot to scare people and force them to stay at home, steal what they can to get supplies and settle among the inhabitants, so that the Ukrainian forces do not bomb them,” said Volodymyr, a 41-year-old resident of Velyka Dymerka, 15km (nine miles) from Brovary.

Russia’s war has sent around 2.2 million refugees across Ukraine’s borders in what the United Nations has called Europe’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II, and sparked fears of wider conflict pulling in the Nato alliance.

Western governments have also balked at Zelensky’s increasingly desperate appeal for a no-fly zone to be declared over Ukraine, fearing it would trigger a conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.

Nevertheless, Western allies have sought to choke the Russian war effort with unprecedented sanctions – including a US ban announced Tuesday on the oil imports that help bankroll the conflict.

The global corporate boycott targeting Moscow also continued to snowball, with Dutch brewery Heineken and Universal Music joining the likes of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Starbucks in suspending business in Russia.

Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Associated Press, dpa