Strike kills Ukraine infant
RUSSIAN strikes killed a newborn baby at a maternity ward in southern Ukraine and targeted energy infrastructure in the capital Kyiv yesterday, the latest in a series of systematic attacks that has caused nationwide blackouts.
The European Parliament meanwhile recognised Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” over its ninemonth invasion of Ukraine and urged the 27-nation EU to follow suit.
Ukrainian emergency services said the Russian rockets smashed into a hospital in Vilniansk, in the southern Zaporizhzhia region that houses Europe’s largest nuclear power plant under Russian control.
President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the strikes as Russian “terror and murder”.
Emergency service workers were shown in official footage wearing protective helmets with head lamps, trying to dig out a man trapped waistdeep from rubble.
“The two-storey building of the maternity ward was destroyed,” the emergency services said in a statement, adding there was a woman, baby and doctor in the building at the time.
“The baby... died. The woman and doctor were rescued from the rubble,” they added. Nobody else was trapped.
The strikes are the latest to hit Ukrainian medical facilities since Russia invaded on February 24.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that systematic attacks on the energy grid were causing severe disruptions at Ukrainian hospitals.
Russian strikes were also targeting Kyiv yesterday, with the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, saying important infrastructure had been hit. The city of Lviv was also left without power after being targeted by strikes, he said.
In Kharkiv, Russian strikes on a residential building and a clinic left two people dead, the governor said.
The WHO said this week it had recorded more than 700 attacks on Ukraine’s health facilities since Russia’s
invasion began. Vilniansk, where the maternity hospital is, is 45km from the front line and last week was targeted in Russian strikes that killed 10 people. It is in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Moscow claimed to have annexed despite not having full control of the territory.
Russia’s strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure also caused blackouts across half of neighbouring Moldova, the deputy prime minister of Moldova, Andrei Spuni, said yesterday.
Electricity outages were also reported in the breakaway Russianbacked region of Transdniestria, the local interior ministry said. Power was later restored in Tiraspol, the capital of the region.
Moldova is one of Europe’s poorest countries and has the highest per capita intake of Ukrainian refugees. It
shares a border with Ukraine, a fellow ex-soviet state, and is connected to its power grid.
The move by the European legislators to recognise Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” is a symbolic political step with no legal consequences. “The deliberate attacks and atrocities carried out by the Russian Federation against the civilian population of Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and other serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law amount to acts of terror,” a resolution approved by EU MPS said.
Meanwhile, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog met a Russian delegation in Istanbul yesterday to discuss safety at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
The Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russia
seized after its February 24 invasion, was again rocked by shelling, leading to renewed calls from the International Atomic Energy Agency to create a protection zone around it to prevent a nuclear disaster. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for shelling at the plant in recent months that has damaged buildings and knocked out power lines supplying the plant that are crucial to cooling the six reactors’ fuel and avoiding a nuclear meltdown.
In a statement, Rosatom nuclear power company said the meeting in Istanbul focused on “ensuring the safety of the plant” and “the parties agreed to continue co-operation”.
The nuclear plant, Europe’s biggest, provided about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before Russia’s invasion, and has been forced to operate on back-up generators at times.