A Russian attack severely damaged a children’s hospital and maternity ward in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials have said. It happened as citizens trying to escape shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv streamed toward the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter there were “people, children under the wreckage” of the hospital and called the strike an “atrocity”. Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded. Mariupol’s city council said on its social media site that the damage was “colossal”.
Meanwhile, civilians trying to escape the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span days ago to slow the Russian advance. With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. On the other side, they trudged past a crashed van with the words “Our Ukraine” written in the dust coating its windows.
