Kyiv, Ukraine: An injured woman, heavily pregnant, is carried on a stretcher past the smouldering wreckage of Mariupol’s maternity and children’s hospital. Her face is pale, one hand cradles her belly in a protective gesture. Every window on that side of the building appears to be blown out; wreckage litters the ground around it.
The searing image was taken following what Mariupol city officials said was a Russian airstrike on the hospital Wednesday that injured 17 people, including children, women and doctors. “Three died, among them one child, a girl,” the city council said Thursday.
The city in southeastern Ukraine has been besieged by Russian forces for days, its trapped residents forced to shelter underground, melt snow for water and scavenge for food. Now, even a hospital caring for pregnant women, newborns and children are not safe.
And Mariupol’s hospital wasn’t the only children’s medical facility that authorities said was damaged by Russian forces on Wednesday. Two hospitals in Zhytomyr, west of the capital, Kyiv, had their windows blown out in a Russian airstrike on a thermal power plant and civilian building in the city, the mayor said. One of them was a children’s hospital. There were no casualties and everyone was in a bomb shelter, according to the city’s mayor, Serhii Sukhomlyn.
The rules of war specify that civilians should not be targeted and that medical workers, medical vehicles and hospitals dedicated to humanitarian work cannot be attacked.
But in the past two weeks, Russian forces have repeatedly struck medical facilities in Ukraine, prompting claims they are being systematically targeted, despite Russian denials.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have been 24 verified attacks on health care facilities in Ukraine so far.”These attacks have led to at least 12 deaths and 17 injuries. At least 8 of the injured and 2 of them were verified to be health workers. The attacks took place between 24 February and 8 March,” WHO said Thursday.”WHO strongly condemns these attacks. Attacks on health care violate international law and endanger lives. Even in times of conflict, we must protect the sanctity and safety of health care, a fundamental human right.”
A CNN crew in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, saw patients — including sick children — take cover in a hospital’s underground bomb shelter as air raid sirens wailed.
Stass, 12 years old and heavily bandaged, was unaware that his father was not with him in the hospital at that moment because he was burying the boy’s mother and sister.
“I was in the neighbour’s basement when the bomb hit the roof on my side,” he said. “We ran to my granny’s house. Another hit there. My arm is broken. My dad and neighbour brought me here. I was in a coma for two days.”
In a late-night video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the Mariupol hospital bombing as an “atrocity and “proof of a genocide of Ukrainians,” as he renewed his calls on Western leaders to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. He also called on Russia to explain why it was carrying out strikes on hospitals. “Why were they a threat to the Russian Federation? What kind of country is the Russian Federation that is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity wards and destroys them?” he said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday alleged without evidence the bombed hospital in Mariupol was the radical Azov battalion’s base and that all patients and nurses had left.
Lavrov said Russia informed the UN Security Council meeting about this a few days before the attack. The Azov battalion is integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces but was formerly an independent ultra-nationalist militia.”On March 7 or 6, I don’t remember exactly now, but at the meeting of the UN Security Council, our delegation presented facts that this maternity hospital had long been captured by the Azov battalion and other radicals,” Lavrov said. “All the women in labour, all the nurses, in general, all the staff was driven out of there,” Lavrov added.
Video from the hospital after the bombing clearly showed there were both patients and staff there, including pregnant women.
(Photo: Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the maternity and children’s hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022.)