Updated: This story has been updated with new details. A Russian attack severely damaged a children's and maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday. Officials said at least 17 people were injured, including staff and patients, but no deaths were confirmed. After that attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter that there were "people, children under the wreckage" of the hospital and called the strike an "atrocity." Video shared by Zelensky showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal and room after room with blown-out windows, the AP reports. Floors were covered in wreckage. Outside, a small fire burned, and debris covered the ground.
Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher as light snow drifted down on burning and mangled cars and trees shattered by the blast. Zelensky described the bombing as a war crime. "What kind of a country is Russia, that it is afraid of hospitals and maternity wards and destroys them?" he asked. Mariupol's city council said the damage was "colossal," the Guardian reports.
"We don't understand how it is possible in modern life to bomb children's hospital," Serhiy Orlov, the city's deputy mayor, told the
BBC. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the attack, as did Martin Griffiths, the UN's humanitarian chief. "There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenseless," Johnson
tweeted. "The UK is exploring more support for Ukraine to defend against airstrikes and we will hold Putin to account for his terrible crimes." Griffiths told
Al Jazeera that bombing the hospital was an "appalling breach" of international law.
(More
Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
