MEAWW.COM / NEWS / HUMAN INTEREST

Russia BOMBS maternity hospital after Ukraine said 3,000 babies need food and medicine

According to the Mariupol city council, the attack on the children's hospital has caused 'colossal damage'

Russia sank to a new low after it bombed a maternity and children's hospital in the city of Mariupol as part of an airstrike. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack a war crime and said that a number of people are trapped under the wreckage. A regional official told Ukrainian media that at least 17 people, including staff and patients, were injured. However, no deaths have been confirmed. 

"We don't understand how it's possible in modern life to bomb a children's hospital. People cannot believe that it's true," Mariupol Deputy Mayor Serhiy Orlov told BBC. According to the Mariupol city council, the attack has caused "colossal damage".

READ MORE

EXCLUSIVE | Kyiv man strives to link Ukrainian refugees with European hosts: 'Don’t be unmoved'

Who was Andrei Sukhovetsky? Ukrainian defense forces kill top Russian general

Zelenskyy posted a footage of the wreckage caused by the strike. "Mariupol. Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity! How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power but you seem to be losing humanity," he captioned the video. 

Just hours before the hospital was attacked, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said that as many as 3,000 babies were surviving without food or medicines. He said that a humanitarian corridor is needed for them to be able to flee. Although Moscow had promised a ceasefire in the city so that civilians could be safely evacuated, it failed to keep its word. 

NATO has claimed that Moscow could possibly be targeting civilians trying to flee Ukraine as part of Putin's reign of terror. On Tuesday, March 8, a convoy of buses packed with people fleeing the war was struck, with 21 people, including two children, losing their lives, Ukrainian authorities said. Thousands of people, including civilians and soldiers, are thought to have been killed. 

In the most recent cases of atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, a chilling video captured the moment when a Russian ‘special peacekeeping’ tank blew up a car in a completely unprovoked attack. An elderly civilian couple was killed inside the car in the attack. A clip doing the rounds on social media shows a car moving into the frame before halting as a Kremlin tank fires on the vehicle twice, blowing it into pieces.

A Ukrainian mother was gunned down by Russian troops along with her two children in a Kyiv suburb on Sunday, March 6, as they were fleeing Irpin. Tatiana Perebeinis, an IT worker, had not fled sooner as she was caring for her ailing mother. Perebeinis, 43, and her two children, Alise, 9, and Nikita, 18, were killed alongside a man they were traveling with when Russian forces indiscriminately fired at them. The family also lost one of their dogs, while the other was found alive at a local shelter with an amputated leg. Perebeinis and her two kids are survived by her husband, identified as Sergey Perebeinis.

In another instance, a Ukrainian woman was gunned down just outside Kyiv while she was on her way back from a dog shelter where she went to deliver food. According to Anastasiia Yalanskaya’s family and friends, Russian troops may have deliberately targeted her vehicle at close-range. Riddled with bullets, Yalanskaya’s car was found near the house of a man she was volunteering with.