Russia announced a ceasefire on Wednesday (9th) and opened humanitarian corridors to some Ukrainian cities, but the southern port city of Mariupol, where one of the humanitarian corridors is located, accused the Russian army of conducting an airstrike on a local hospital, injuring at least 17 people, including Including hospital staff and mothers.
The Mariupol City Council said that a medical facility recently used to treat children was completely destroyed, and that information on casualties was currently being investigated. It also described the scale of damage to the hospital by the Russian army. The Donetsk regional government said the attacked medical facility was located in the center of Mariupol, with a gynecological hospital, children’s ward and internal medicine department. The city’s university facilities and city government buildings were also bombed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the Russian military’s direct attack on the women’s hospital, questioned how the attacked hospital threatened Russia, and asked whether Russia’s actions were “denazification” of the hospital. He continued that whether hospitals, schools, churches or ordinary buildings were destroyed, people and children were killed, and he denounced the airstrikes on children’s hospitals as the ultimate proof of the ongoing genocide in Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the Ukrainian army drove patients and staff out of the gynecological hospital and equipped the hospital as a combat position, and criticized Ukraine for a lot of false information.
