Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of bombing a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol, a port in the south of the country that is under siege, during the ceasefire agreed between the two sides to allow civilians to leave the city.
According to the local government, 17 women and children were injured in the attack. Available images suggest that the area next to the building was hit either by artillery or planes. Pregnant women were removed from the smoldering rubble outside the building, creating iconic images of the war drama.
The incident was immediately used by Kiev in its campaign to establish a no-fly zone over the country. NATO (western military alliance) refuses to do so, because that would mean declaring war on the Russians, who already have relative dominance in the Ukrainian skies.
“The destruction is colossal. Direct attack by Russian troops on the maternity hospital. People, children are under the rubble,” tweeted President Volodymyr Zelensky, although the images available so far do not indicate this condition of the victims.
Ukraine says 1,170 of Mairupol’s more than 400,000 pre-war residents have already died after the invasion. In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov again said that Russian forces are not targeting civilians in this campaign.
The Ministry of Defense has updated some figures on what it says it has destroyed in the neighboring country: 90% of the airstrips with military use, 974 tanks and armored vehicles, 97 drones. As in all active wars, there is no way to check the accuracy of this information, or that released in Kiev.
Mariupol is a central point of the southern front of Vladimir Putin’s war. It is the last stronghold to stand against the Russians in what is established as an area linking the Donbass, the ethnic Russian separatist east of Ukraine, to the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014.
If it falls, Moscow assumes military control of the region, which of course does not mean that it manages it easily. On the contrary, in the port of Kherson, further east, the captured city is experiencing daily protests against the invaders.
Since the weekend, the Russians have been using their tactical aviation more intensively in the country. Perhaps disregarding the large amount of portable anti-aircraft missiles given by the West to the Ukrainians or forced by bad weather, which requires flying low to have a view of the targets, the Air Force has suffered losses.
The US accused her on Wednesday of using “dumb” bombs without laser or satellite guidance in the military campaign. In fact, footage of a Su-34 fighter-bomber shot down on Saturday (5) showed FAB-500 free-fall bombs. This can facilitate damage to civilians.
More than 2 million people left Ukraine for neighboring countries, mainly Poland and Hungary. Many, perhaps 200,000, are still concentrated in Lviv, the country’s “western capital” near the Polish border.
