Poland's President Andrzej Duda on Thursday said Russian bombardments of hospitals and housing estates, and the resulting loss of civilian lives, were barbaric and resembled genocide.
Speaking the day after a Russian attack on a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, Duda told a news conference: "There are pregnant women, there are children, if you kill ordinary people you throw bombs, rockets, at housing estates, this is barbarism bearing the features of genocide."
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Turkey for talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, said a maternity hospital hit by Russian bombardment was no longer being used as a hospital and had been occupied by Ukrainian forces, though the Kremlin separately said the incident was being investigated.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Nandita Bose, Joanna Plucinska, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Jon Boyle)
