A car burns in the courtyard of the Mariupol Children’s Hospital, totally destroyed by Russian aviation. /
Children and mothers are trapped under the rubble of a Mariupol maternity flattened by Putin’s aircraft
Food is scarce, there are no medicines, electricity and mobile communications have collapsed. And none of its streets remains unscathed from destruction. Mariúpol, that small port city in the southeast of Ukraine that has been repeatedly hit by Russian bombing for a week, is already experiencing hell. A situation that the Red Cross defines without half measures as “apocalyptic”.
Humanitarian disaster in the making. To whom the struggle of stories of this war does not yet allow to give a final certificate. The numbers of injured or deceased among the population are presumed dramatic in this town that had just over 400,000 inhabitants four years ago.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warns of the dramatic unknowns that are yet to be cleared up. In the last few hours, the number of wounded and 474 civilian deaths in the Ukraine war was estimated at 861. But “the bureau believes the actual numbers are considerably higher.” And it focused, in fact, on the consequences of the harassment of Mariúpol, with hundreds of reports of attacks on its inhabitants with explosive weapons, including heavy artillery shelling, multiple rocket launch systems, and air missile attacks.
This Wednesday the series of bombings hit a mother and child hospital. “The destruction is colossal and there are people trapped under the rubble,” local authorities warned. The country’s president, Valídimir Zelenski, denounced him through Twitter. He described the event as an “atrocity”. “There are people, children, under the rubble. How much longer will the world remain complicit and ignorant of terror? Declare the no-fly zone right now! Stop the slaughter! You have the power, but it seems that you are losing humanity”, he accused NATO, which persists in the position of not extending the conflict outside the borders of Ukraine.
international outrage
After several hours of speculation about the real scale and consequences of this attack, the regional official, Pavlo Kirilenko, in statements to Ukrainian television, confirmed that at least 17 adults had been injured. In principle “no child” among them. He did not speak of deaths. Although the simple realization that the Kremlin had chosen this objective has already triggered international outrage.
“No health center should ever be a target,” said UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. “It is appalling to see the barbaric use of military force against innocent civilians in a sovereign country,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki at a press conference. Even the Vatican called the attack “unacceptable.” “There are no reasons, there are no motivations to do this,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters.
This Wednesday’s was the last black episode to be written in this city that rests on the shores of the Sea of Azov and that has become a key point for the Kremlin’s strategy that, through them, intends to connect continental Russia with the Crimean peninsula that it invaded in 2014. The Zelensky government maintains that Mariúpol has been crushed by bombing for nine days “without communications, electricity, food and water.”
Doctors Without Borders has been insisting for days in critical situations. Real hardships. “We collected snow and rainwater to be able to drink”; “We also try to get bread, but there is no clarity regarding the schedule or the places where it is distributed.”
“According to the population, several food stores have been destroyed by the missiles and what could be saved was taken by desperate people. We still have no electricity, no water, no heating, and no mobile phone network. No one has yet heard of any evacuation. The pharmacies do not have medicines”, recounted one of the workers of this entity.
A few hours before what is presumed to be the first important meeting to find a way out of this war – the meeting scheduled for this Thursday between the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia under the mediation of their Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu – the head of the Ukrainian diplomat, Dmitro Kuleba, demanded that the West take forceful measures “in order to stop this barbaric war against civilians and babies.”
Kuleba stressed that the Moscow government “is blocking humanitarian aid and the evacuation” of civilians from Mariupol using “indiscriminate bombing.” And he was referring to the critical situation in which the little ones find themselves. “Some 3,000 babies need food and medicine,” he assured before insisting that the international community must “act without wasting time.”
The demand for safe ways for civilians to leave the city has been maintained since the first day of the siege of Mariúpol and other urban centers. This Wednesday, the one established for Zaporizhia, also to the southeast, failed, as has been happening for days. Because the Russian attacks did not stop.
WHO denounces 18 attacks
The World Health Organization confirmed on Wednesday that at least ten people have died and sixteen have been injured in a total of eighteen attacks perpetrated in Ukraine against health centers and ambulances since the beginning of the invasion. The director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, showed his concern over these events, expressed his rejection of the war and called on the Kremlin to resolve the crisis “peacefully.”
The organization stressed that the bombings against hospitals “deprive entire communities of health care”, which aggravates the assistance to the victims of the clashes, as well as to the rest of the population, who cannot cope either with diseases or the epidemic of the coronavirus. Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked Russia to “allow safe and unhindered access of humanitarian aid to those who need it” and insisted that “a peaceful resolution is possible.”
For his part, Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Emergencies Program, pointed out that up to a thousand health centers “of different sizes are on the front line of the war or less than ten kilometers away”, which confirms that “the The health system is becoming involved in this conflict. He warned that, apart from direct or indirect attacks, “some hospitals are being abandoned by the Ukrainian authorities because they simply cannot function and attempts are being made to transfer hospital equipment and doctors and nurses.”
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.