Reports of children trapped under wreckage after Russian forces attack hospital complex
A Russian attack severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol – wounding at least 17 people, Ukraine has said.
It comes 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.
The ground shook more than a mile away when a series of blasts slammed into the Mariupol complex, blowing out windows and ripping away much of the front of one building.
Police and soldiers rushed to scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher.
Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, mangled cars burned, and a blast crater went at least two stories deep.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter there were "people, children under the wreckage" of the hospital and called the strike an "atrocity".
Video footage shared by Mr
Zelensky showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal and room after room with blown-out windows. Floors were covered in wreckage. Outside, a small fire burned and debris covered the ground.
Mariupol's city council said on its social media site that the damage was "colossal".
Authorities announced new ceasefires yesterday morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv as well as the southern cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast. Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors largely failed because of what the Ukrainians said were Russian attacks. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a telephone call with German's chancellor, accused militant Ukrainian nationalists of hampering the evacuations.
It was not clear whether anyone was able to leave other cities yesterday, but people streamed out of Kyiv's suburbs, many headed for the city centre, even as explosions were heard and air raid sirens sounded. From there, they planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack.