Surgeon Timur Marin told Ukrainian television from Mariupol: “While she was being resuscitated and taking anti-shock measures, we performed a caesarean section and took the child with no signs of life. Resuscitation of the child for more than half an hour had no effect. Resuscitation of the mother for half an hour or more – to no avail. Both are dead.”
Last week, an Associated Press image was shown around the world, including CNN, of emergency workers carrying an injured woman on a stretcher outside a bombed-out hospital.
According to the AR, the doctors did not have time to find out the name of the woman, as her husband and father came to collect her body, so she did not end up in one of the mass graves in Mariupol.
As CNN previously reported, at least three people, including a child, died in Wednesday’s attack, which came despite Russia agreeing to a 12-hour pause in hostilities to allow refugees to evacuate.
The attack on a key city in southeastern Ukraine comes after it was besieged by Russian forces for days, and trapped residents were forced to take shelter underground, melt snow in search of water and scavenge for food.
Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser in the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Monday that more than 2,500 people have died as a result of Russian bombing of Mariupol. CNN cannot independently verify these casualty figures.
“Our military is making progress — yesterday they fought off another attempt at a tank breakthrough in Mariupol, they took prisoners of war,” Arestovich said on Monday. “But for this, the Russians wipe the city off the face of the earth.”
The Mariupol administration confirmed on Sunday that a large humanitarian aid convoy destined for the besieged city had not arrived and was still stuck in Berdyansk, about 50 miles to the west.
After Wednesday’s attack on the hospital, Mariupol’s city council accused Russian forces of dropping several aerial bombs on it, calling the destruction “enormous.”
Last week, Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko accused the Russians of genocide for shelling civilian homes. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky called the terrorist attack in the hospital “an atrocity”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday claimed without evidence that the bombed-out hospital was being used by Ukrainian forces and that all the patients and nurses had left. Later Thursday, a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman denied at a briefing that Russia fired at the maternity hospital at all, calling it a “provocation.”
Tim Lister of CNN reported and wrote from Lviv, while Alex Stumbo wrote from Hong Kong. Jeevan Ravindran, Julia Kesa, Laura Smith-Spark, Olga Voitovich and Rob Picheta contributed to this report.