Russian attack damages children's hospital, maternity ward in Ukraine's Mariupol, say officials
India Today
A Russian attack severely damaged a children's hospital and maternity ward in Ukraine's Mariupol city, officials said on Wednesday.
A Russian attack severely damaged a children's hospital and maternity ward in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday, as citizens trying to escape shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv streamed toward the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow's invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter that there were “people, children under the wreckage” of the hospital and called the strike an “atrocity.” Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded.
Mariupol's city council said on its social media site that the damage was “colossal.” Meanwhile, civilians trying to escape the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to Kyiv days ago to slow the Russian advance, With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. On the other side, they trudged past a crashed van with the words “Our Ukraine” written in the dust coating its windows.
READ: Russian military steps up shelling of key Ukrainian cities, bombs hit residential areas
“We have a short window of time at the moment,'' said Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine's territorial defense forces. “Even if there is a ceasefire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.” Authorities announced the new cease-fire Wednesday morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv as well as the southern cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast. Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors largely failed because of Russian attacks.
It was not immediately clear whether anyone was able to leave other cities, but people streamed out of Kyiv's suburbs, many headed for the city center, even as explosions were heard in the capital and air raid sirens sounded repeatedly. From there, they planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack, In Mariupol, local authorities hurried to bury the dead in a mass grave. City workers dug a trench some 25 meters (yards) long at one of the city's old cemeteries and made a sign of the cross as they pushed bodies wrapped in carpets or bags over the edge.
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin's forces invaded. The U.N. estimates more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
