KOZELETS, Ukraine — With basic survival in Ukraine growing increasingly precarious, civilian evacuation efforts largely sputtered Wednesday across a country battered by a relentless Russian assault that officials said heavily damaged a maternity hospital.
Ukraine’s government had announced a daylong cease-fire along several corridors around the country that were designated for the safe exit of residents. The routes covered some of the hardest-hit areas, including the southern port city of Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been trapped for days with no electricity and water and dwindling supplies of food and medicine.
But late Wednesday afternoon, Russia appeared to break the cease-fire when bombs slammed into a hospital complex in the city, burying children in the wreckage. Images showed emergency responders carrying a bloodied pregnant woman through a courtyard littered with mangled cars and a heavily damaged building still smoldering.
