• Moscow denies targeting civilians

A Russian air strike badly damaged a children’s hospital in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol yesterday, burying patients under rubble and injuring women in labour, Ukraine said.
The bombing, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called an “atrocity,” took place despite an agreed ceasefire to enable thousands of civilians trapped in the city to escape.
The city council said the hospital had been hit several times by an air strike, causing “colossal” destruction.
“Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage,” Zelenskiy said on Twitter.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment, said: “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry posted footage of what it said was the hospital showing blasted-out windows and piles of smouldering rubble.
The Donetsk region’s governor said 17 people were wounded, including women in labour. The United Nations human rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine was verifying the number of casualites, a UN spokesperson in Geneva said.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia had broken the ceasefire around the southern port, which lies between Russian-backed separatist areas of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, annexed by Moscow from Ukraine in 2014.
“Russia continues holding hostage over 400,000 people in Mariupol, blocks humanitarian aid and evacuation. Indiscriminate shelling continues,” he wrote on Twitter. “Almost 3,000 newborn babies lack medicine and food.”
Ukraine said 67 children across the country had been killed since the invasion and at least 1,170 civilians had died in Mariupol.
It was not possible to verify the figures, but satellite image company Maxar said images showed extensive damage to homes, apartment buildings, grocery stores and shopping centres.
Russia’s defence ministry blamed Ukraine for the failure of the evacuation. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said houses had been reduced to rubble all across Ukraine.
“Families are huddled underground for hours on end to seek refuge from fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people have no food, no water, no heat, no electricity and no medical care.”
More than 2mn people have fled Ukraine since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb 24. Moscow calls its action a “special military operation” to disarm its neighbour and dislodge leaders it calls “neo-Nazis.”
Ukraine’s nuclear power plant operator said it was concerned for safety at Chernobyl, mothballed site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, where it said a power cut caused by fighting meant spent nuclear fuel could not be cooled. Russia’s defence ministry blamed Ukraine for the power cut.
Kuleba said reserve diesel generators had a 48-hour capacity. “After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent,” he said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said the heat generated by the spent fuel and the volume of cooling water were such that it was “sufficient for effective heat removal without need for electrical supply”.
A nuclear expert with knowledge of the plant’s system said a key question would be how rapidly power can be restored.