A pregnant woman about to give birth died in the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, southern Ukraine, last Wednesday (9), according to the Associated Press news agency.
Images of the pregnant woman being rescued bloodied on a stretcher have become one of the symbols of the attack on the hospital, described by Ukrainian authorities as a war crime.
According to the agency, she was taken to another hospital, still close to the battlefront, with serious injuries to her pelvis and hip. Doctors performed a cesarean section, but the baby was already dead.
According to a surgeon, when she realized she was losing the baby, the woman even screamed: “Kill me now”. She underwent resuscitation techniques but did not survive her injuries.
Doctors said they didn’t have time to get the name of the mother and baby, and she was identified by her husband after her death.
Russia justified the attack by saying that Ukrainian extremists were using the maternity hospital as a hiding place, and said there were no doctors or patients there. Journalists, however, saw and reported a number of injured people being hastily rescued, including pregnant women and children.
Also according to the news agency, the woman was one of three pregnant women who were identified as victims of the attack on the maternity ward. The other two and their respective babies survived.
Medical staff said they were grateful that despite the tragedy, the woman was not buried in a mass grave. Since last Thursday (10), part of the dead in the attacks on Mariupol have been buried in mass graves due to the volume of dead and the difficulty of identifying the bodies.
According to the Ukrainian government, at least 17 women and children were injured in the attack on the maternity and children’s hospital. Images from the site indicate that the area next to the building was hit by artillery or planes.
“The destruction is colossal. Direct attack by Russian troops on the maternity hospital. People, children are under the rubble,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter at the time.
Later the same day, the Ukrainian accused Moscow of promoting genocide. “What country is this, which is afraid of hospitals and maternity hospitals and destroys them?”
The Russian Defense Ministry denied the following day that its troops had bombed the site. According to the folder, images of injured people and the accusations by Ukrainian authorities are part of a “staged provocation”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the attack allegations as “pathetic”. He claims that, contrary to what Kiev said, the attacked building had been without patients for days and had been occupied by Ukrainian soldiers.
The Russian Embassy in the UK made a series of posts on Twitter and Facebook in which it called the bombing of the maternity hospital “fake news”. The material, however, was removed by the platforms. One of the posts brought images with a red stripe with the word “fake” and saying that motherhood served as a basis for Ukrainian resistance against Russian forces.
