Ukraine-Russia talks stall as outrage grows over maternity hospital bombing
CBC
The latest:
A Russian airstrike that hit a Mariupol maternity hospital brought condemnation down on Moscow Thursday, with Ukrainian and Western officials branding it a war crime while the highest-level talks to date between the two sides yielded no progress toward a ceasefire.
Emergency workers renewed efforts to get food and medical supplies into besieged cities and get traumatized civilians out.
Ukrainian authorities said a child was among the dead in Wednesday's airstrike in the vital southern port city of Mariupol.
Seventeen people were also wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors and children buried in the rubble.
Images of pregnant women covered in dust and blood dominated news reports in many countries and brought a new wave of horror at the two-week-old war sparked by Russia's invasion.
Precise death tolls are impossible to verify but the UN human rights office said earlier this week that it has verified 1,207 civilian casualties, including 406 people killed and 801 injured, but that the true number is likely much higher. More than 2.3 million people, mostly women and children, have fled Ukraine since the war started on Feb. 24, the UNHCR said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Russian leaders that the invasion will backfire on them as their economy is strangled. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow to the economy, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee — including, on Thursday, investment bank Goldman Sachs — and prices to rise sharply.
"You will definitely be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes," Zelensky said in a video address. "And then, it will definitely happen, you will be hated by Russian citizens — everyone whom you have been deceiving constantly, daily, for many years in a row, when they feel the consequences of your lies in their wallets, in their shrinking possibilities, in the stolen future of Russian children."
Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed such talk, saying the country has endured sanctions before.
"Just as we overcame these difficulties in the previous years, we will overcome them now," he said at a televised meeting of government officials. He did, however, acknowledge the sanctions create "certain challenges."
In addition to those who have fled Ukraine, millions more have been displaced inside the country. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Thursday that about two million people — half the residents of the metro area of the capital — have left the city, which has become virtually a fortress.
"Every street, every house ... is being fortified, the territorial defence is joining. Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands."
Bombs fell on two hospitals in Zhytomyr, west of the capital, Kyiv, on Wednesday, its mayor said. The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the invasion began.
