MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian airstrike on a Mariupol maternity hospital that killed three people brought condemnation down on Moscow on Thursday, with Ukrainian and Western officials branding it a war crime, while the highest-level talks yet yielded no progress in stopping the fighting.
Emergency workers renewed efforts to get food and medical supplies into besieged cities and get traumatized civilians out.
Ukrainian authorities said a child was among the dead in Wednesday’s airstrike in the vital southern port of Mariupol. In addition to the dead, 17 people were wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors, and children buried in the rubble.
Images of pregnant women covered in dust and blood dominated news reports in many countries and brought a new wave of horror over the 2-week-old war sparked by Russia’s invasion, which has killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, shaken the foundations of European security and driven more than 2 million people from Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Russian leaders that the invasion will backfire on them as their economy is strangled. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow to the economy, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee and prices to rise sharply.
“You will definitely be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes,” he said in a video address. “And then, it will definitely happen, you will be hated by Russian citizens — everyone whom you have been deceiving constantly, daily, for many years in a row, when they feel the consequences of your lies in their wallets, in their shrinking possibilities, in the stolen future of Russian children.”
Millions more have been displaced inside the country. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday that about 2 million people — half the population of the capital’s metropolitan area — have left the city, which has become virtually a fortress.
“Every street, every house … is being fortified,” he said. “Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”