On 9 March, a distraught Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded to the world, after a direct air strike by Russian forces left a maternity hospital in rubble, to stop being “an accomplice ignoring terror”
Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the damaged by shelling maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. AP
On 9 March, a distraught Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded to the world, after a direct air strike by Russian forces left a maternity hospital in rubble, to stop being “an accomplice ignoring terror”.
Sharing a video of the hospital in Mariupol, the Ukrainian president condemned the atrocities of the Russian forces as the world that was “losing humanity” looked on as a spectator.
The strike on the child and maternity hospital was one of the many such assaults on residential areas in the city of Mariupol. The attack on the city, among the fiercest in the two week-long battle, has again raised questions about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The city that is home to over 4 lakh people has been under siege for 10 days now as repeated attempts of rescuing injured and evacuating people have failed. The Russian forces, however, have continued the onslaught on the city, leaving more than 1,300 dead, according to the officials.
How and why Mariupol has suffered the most in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, let’s take a look:
Mariupol’s misery
The port city in southeastern Ukraine has received the worst of Russian attacks since as early as 3 March.
On Wednesday, an airstrike by Russian forces at a children’s hospital left at least three dead, including a child, and 17 people injured. While Ukraine blamed Russia for breaking a ceasefire, Russia said its forces “do not fire on civilian targets” and blamed Ukraine for the failure of a planned evacuation from Mariupol.
In this video grab from a handout footage taken and released by the the National Police of Ukraine on 9 March, people are helped out of a damaged building of a children’s hospital following a Russian air strike in the southeastern city of Mariupol. AFP
The air strike on the hospital, which officials said held both maternity and paediatric units, blew out windows, ripped down partition walls and set fire to cars parked outside, videos posted by officials showed.
“We have not done and would never do anything like this war crime in any of the cities of the Donetsk or Lugansk regions, or of any region… because we are people. But are you?” Zelenskyy asked, switching to Russian to make his point.
“What kind of a country is Russia, that it is afraid of hospitals and maternity wards and destroys them?” he asked.
A Russian attack has severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials say. AP
As per a Reuters report, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said not a single civilian was able to leave Mariupol on Thursday as Russian forces failed to respect a temporary ceasefire to allow evacuations.
Efforts to send food, water and medicine into the city of Mariupol failed when Russian tanks attacked a humanitarian corridor, President Zelenskyy said.
The “occupiers launched a tank attack exactly where this corridor was supposed to be”, Zelenskyy said in a televised address. “They have a clear order to hold Mariupol hostage, to mock it, to constantly bomb and shell it.”
He added, “This is outright terror … from experienced terrorists.”
According to a report by the Associated Press, authorities in Mariupol have buried scores of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in mass graves, though the number is unclear.
With morgues overflowing and more corpses uncollected in homes, city officials decided they could not wait to hold individual burials.
Dead bodies are placed into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine as people cannot bury their dead because of the heavy shelling by Russian forces. AP
The shelling has shattered buildings, and the city has no water, heat, working sewage systems or phone service.
Theft has become widespread for food, clothes, even furniture, with locals referring to the practice as “getting a discount.” Some residents are reduced to scooping water from streams.
With the electricity out, many people are relying on their car radios for information, picking up news from stations broadcast from areas controlled by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists.
According to Al Jazeera, a local official said that civilians trapped in Mariupol have gone through “two days of hell” as Russians attacked “every 30 minutes”, making any evacuation attempts next to impossible.
As per the report, Mayor Vadym Boychenko said that Russian forces continued to “cynically, ruthlessly and purposefully” attack apartment buildings.
“Every 30 minutes, planes arrived over the city of Mariupol and worked on residential areas, killing civilians – the elderly, women, and children. Is this the greatness of the Russian army today?” he said in an online post.
The city is strategically important as its capture would allow Russia to link up pro-Moscow enclaves in the east and Russian-annexed Crimea to the south, the Al Jazeera report said.
With inputs from agencies
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