Ukraine: 'Children are under the wreckage' - Russian airstrike destroys Mariupol hospital
Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the damaged by shelling maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, . A Russian attack has severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol. Picture: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Shutterstock
A Russian airstrike has destroyed a children's and maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine.
The ground shook more than a mile away when a series of blasts slammed into the Mariupol complex, blowing out windows and ripping away much of the front of one building.
Police and soldiers rushed to scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher.
Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, mangled cars burned, and a blast crater went at least two stories deep.
Writing on Twitter this afternoon, President Zelenskyy said children had been buried under the rubble from the "direct strike."
"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 said.
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. pic.twitter.com/FoaNdbKH5k
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 9, 2022
Mariupol city council said in a Facebook post that the level of destruction at the hospital was "colossal."
"The building of the medical facility where the children were treated recently is completely destroyed," the council wrote.
"Information on casualties is being clarified."
Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the regional military administration, said that the maternity ward in the city centre, the children’s ward and the therapy ward at the hospital were "all destroyed in a Russian air raid on Mariupol."
Mr Kyrylenko wrote that Russia has "not only crossed the border of unacceptable relations between states and peoples."
The Donetsk region's governor said 17 people were wounded, including women in labour. This number is yet to be verified, however.
Footage shared online showed holes where windows were shattered, and widespread damage all around one three-storey building at the hospital.
Reacting to news of the attack, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said "this war on civilians must end"
"With multiple reports of a missile strike destroying maternity & children’s hospital in #Mariupol, despite ceasefire agreement, the indiscriminate cruelty of Putin’s invasion is crystal clear," the Taoiseach wrote on Twitter.
With multiple reports of a missile strike destroying maternity & children’s hospital in #Mariupol, despite ceasefire agreement, the indiscriminate cruelty of Putin’s invasion is crystal clear.
— Micheál Martin (@MichealMartinTD) March 9, 2022
This war on civilians must end.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there are "few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless."
Mr Johnson pledged that his government would hold Putin to account "for his terrible crimes".
The UN and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have called for an "immediate halt to attacks on health care, hospitals, health care workers, ambulances".
"None of these should ever, ever be a target," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said this evening.
Mr Dujarric said the UN was following up on the reported "shocking" attack on a children's and maternity hospital Mariupol.
"These attacks deprive whole communities of healthcare," said WHO head Dr Tedros Adhanom.
The WHO said it has so far verified at least 18 different attacks on health facilities in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.
Earlier, renewed efforts to evacuate civilians from besieged and bombarded Ukrainian cities got underway as authorities seek to rescue people from increasingly dire conditions.
Days of shelling had largely cut residents of the southern city of Mariupol off from the outside world and forced them to scavenge for food and water.
Authorities had announced another cease-fire to allow civilians to escape from Mariupol and Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east, and several towns in the region around the capital Kyiv.
Russia's strike on the hospital in Mariupol came during the agreed ceasefire period.
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors have largely failed due to attacks by Russian forces, and there were few details on Wednesday’s new effort. But air raid sirens repeatedly went off in the capital and explosions could be heard there, raising tensions in the rattled city.
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded.
The UN estimates that more than two million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
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Ukraine appealed to Russia for a temporary ceasefire on Wednesday to allow repairs to be made to a power line to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, warning that there could be a radiation leak if the electricity outage continued.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear company Energoatom said fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces made it impossible to immediately repair the high-voltage power line to the plant, which has been captured by Russian forces.
Energoatom said radioactive substances could be released if the plant cannot cool spent nuclear fuel, and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said reserve diesel generators can power the plant for only 48 hours.
"After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent," Kuleba said on Twitter.
The UN nuclear watchdog said the loss of power does not have a critical impact on safety.
"Heat load of spent fuel storage pool and volume of cooling water at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sufficient for effective heat removal without need for electrical supply," the IAEA said in a statement.
But Energoatom said there were about 20,000 spent fuel assemblies at Chernobyl that could not be kept cool during a power outage, and that their warming could lead to "the release of radioactive substances into the environment.
#Ukraine has informed IAEA of power loss at #Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, @rafaelmgrossi says development violates key safety pillar on ensuring uninterrupted power supply; in this case IAEA sees no critical impact on safety.
— IAEA - International Atomic Energy Agency ⚛️ (@iaeaorg) March 9, 2022
The radioactive cloud could be carried by wind to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Europe, it said in a statement.
Without power, ventilation systems at the plant would also not be working, exposing staff to dangerous doses of radiation, it added.
On Tuesday, the IAEA had warned that the systems monitoring nuclear material at the radioactive waste facilities at Chernobyl had stopped transmitting data.
The still-radioactive site of the world's worst nuclear disaster lies some 100 km (62 miles) from Kyiv.
Its fourth reactor exploded in April 1986 during a botched safety test, sending clouds of radiation billowing across much of Europe.
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