Doctors, crater disprove Ukraine hospital airstrike misinfo

Accounts by three doctors at a Ukrainian maternity hospital hit by an airstrike and an analysis of the crater disprove Russian misinformation about the March 9 attack that killed a pregnant woman and her unborn child

LVIV, Ukraine -- A woman on the verge of giving birth with her leg flayed open by shrapnel. A shockwave that shattered the glass and ceramic lining of a room with medical waste. A nurse who suffered a concussion.

This is what the Ukrainian doctors remember of the Russian airstrike that destroyed the Mariupol maternity hospital where they once worked. And these memories are now all they have from a day they wish they could forget: Russian soldiers purged the evidence from their phones when they fled Mariupol.

“With just one blow, there was simply nothing, no children’s clinic, it was simply blown away, ” said Dr. Lyudmila Mykhailenko, the acting director at Hospital No. 3 in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The sprawling courtyard of the hospital complex was — and remains — “one continuous shell crater.”

Three doctors and a paramedic spoke with The Associated Press to offer new details from a March 9 airstrike that happened when communications were all but severed, and to counter fresh Russian misinformation. They left the city separately in private cars, as have thousands from Mariupol in recent weeks, and are now scattered in other towns around Ukraine and in Poland.