Three people died in the Mariupol Children’s Hospital, including a girl
Three people, including a child, were killed when a Russian hospital shelled a children’s hospital in Mariupol on Wednesday, the port city’s mayor’s office said Thursday. “Three people died, including a little girl,” the municipality said on Telegram. In the previous report, published the day before by the authorities, 17 victims were reported.
“Barbarian”, “immoral”, “war crime”: the shelling of a children’s hospital by Russian troops in the besieged Mariupol outraged the Ukrainian authorities and Westerners, and the Russian army approached Kiev on Thursday, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. The attack came ahead of Thursday’s talks in Turkey between Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers, their first face-to-face meeting since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine two weeks ago.
French government spokesman Gabriel Attal on Thursday condemned the “inhumane and cowardly” strikes. “I want to say on behalf of the French government: Russian strikes on the Mariupol children’s hospital are inhumane and cowardly. It’s women, children, caregivers, it’s unspeakable and we call again for a ceasefire,” Mr. Attal said on RTL.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has condemned a “war crime”, on Wednesday shared footage of the destruction following an air raid on a facility that housed a maternity hospital and a children’s hospital in Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea Coast. Azov in the southeast of Ukraine. You can see the interiors of buildings blown away by the wind, debris scattered on the ground, sheets of paper and shards of glass.
The White House, for its part, condemned the “barbaric” use of force against civilians, while British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the explosion “immoral”.
The shelling occurred during childbirth in a hospital that had just been refurbished, an employee of the military administration of the Donetsk region told Agence France-Presse.
The Russian government did not deny the attack, but said Ukrainian “nationalist battalions” used the hospital as a firing base. In the nine days of the siege of Mariupol, 1,207 people have already died, the mayor’s office said on Wednesday evening.