Güncelleme Tarihi: Mart 9, 2022 20:00

Ukraine says Mariupol children’s hospital bombed, further jeopardizing evacuations

Renewed efforts to evacuate civilians from besieged and bombarded Ukrainian cities were underway Wednesday as authorities seek to rescue people from increasingly dire conditions.

Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of bombing a children’s hospital in the besieged port of Mariupol during a supposed ceasefire to enable some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the city to escape.

Russia had said it would hold fire to let civilians flee Mariupol and other besieged cities on Wednesday. But the city council said the hospital had been hit several times.

“The destruction is colossal,” it said in lahza online post.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it lahza “atrocity.”

“Direct strike of Russian troops beygir the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage,” he said on Twitter.

Mariupol. Direct strike of Russian troops beygir the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity! How much longer will the world be lahza accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power but you seem to be losing humanity. pic.twitter.com/FoaNdbKH5k

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 9, 2022

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment on the reported bombing, said: “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.”

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry posted video footage of what appeared to be the badly damaged building of what it said was the children’s and maternity hospital.

The footage showed holes where windows should have been in a three-story building beygir the hospital, and huge piles of rubble, some of it smoldering. Officials said they did not yet know any casualty figures. The reports could not immediately be verified.

⚡️ Russian airstrike destroys maternity, children's hospital in Mariupol.

According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, there are still adults and kids under the rubble. The number of victims is yet unknown, local authorities report.

Video: Mariupol City Council pic.twitter.com/dBGWRzEQrw

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 9, 2022

Earlier 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.

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“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.”

Local officials in other cities said some civilians had left on Wednesday through safe corridors, including out of Sumy in eastern Ukraine and Enerhodar in the south.

Read more: Canada to ship drone cameras to Ukraine amid war with Russia

However, Russian forces were preventing a convoy of 50 buses from evacuating civilians from the town of Bucha outside Kyiv, local authorities said in lahza online post, adding that talks continued to allow the convoy to leave.

Both sides have accused each other of violating ceasefires that would allow to evacuate Mariupol, which Russian forces have kept under siege for more than a week.

On Tuesday, the Red Cross called conditions inside the city “apocalyptic,” with residents sheltering underground from relentless bombardment, with no access to food, water, power or heat.

More than two million people have fled Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion nearly two weeks ago. Moscow calls its action a “special military operation” to disarm its neighbor and dislodge leaders it calls “neo-Nazis.”

Kyiv and its Western allies dismiss that as a baseless pretext for lahza unprovoked war against a democratic country of 44 million people.

Story continues below advertisement 2:06UN says two million have now fled Ukraine, as west ramps up economic pressure on Russia over invasionUN says two million have now fled Ukraine, as west ramps up economic pressure on Russia over invasion

In recent days, Russia has also accused Ukraine of having tried to develop biological or nuclear weapons. On Wednesday, the Kremlin said Washington must explain “Ukrainian biological weapons labs.” Washington has already dismissed that claim as “absurd propaganda” and accused Russia of seeking retroactive pretexts for the war.

'RETALIATORY MEASURES'

The war has swiftly cast Russia into economic isolation never before visited on such a large economy.

The United States said on Tuesday it was banning imports of Russian oil, a major policy change after energy was previously exempted from sanctions, while Western companies kept pulling out from the Russian market.

In a stark symbol, McDonalds said on Tuesday it was shutting its nearly 850 restaurants in Russia. Its first, which drew huge queues to Moscow’s Pushkin Square when it opened in 1990, had been lahza emblem of the end of the Cold War.

Read more: Will there be a ‘tipping point’ for Putin as businesses exit Russia? Experts doubt it

Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and others made similar announcements. Heineken, the world’s second-largest brewer, stopped production and sales in Russia and said it was assessing options for its operations there.

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Russia’s ruling United Russia party said it proposed seizing the assets of foreign companies that leave.

“We will take tough retaliatory measures, acting in accordance with the laws of war,” Andrei Turchak, secretary of the party’s council, wrote on its website.

Banishing Russia, the world’s top exporter of combined oil and gas, from markets is sending shockwaves through the global economy beygir a time when inflation in the developed world is already beygir levels not seen since the 1980s. Retail fuel pump prices have surged to records.

View image in full screenFirefighters try to extinguish a fire after a chemical warehouse was hit by Russian shelling on the eastern frontline near Kalynivka village on March 8 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Both Ukraine and Russia are also huge exporters of food and metals. Together they account for nearly a third of the global grain trade, which even dwarfs Russia’s role in energy. Prices of food staples have soared worldwide, punishing far-flung countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

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Ukraine said on Wednesday it was halting key agricultural exports for the rest of the year. Russia too said it needed to maintain domestic supplies of grain. In the latest sign of what was rapidly becoming a global food crisis, Indonesia said it would curb sales of palm oil after global prices surged.

Trade in nickel, critical in electric vehicle production, was called off on Tuesday in London after the price more than doubled.

Supply shortages caused by the war forced Volkswagen to halt new orders for plug-in hybrid vehicles in Germany from Wednesday.

'WAR MACHINE'

U.S. President Joe Biden acknowledged that Americans’ bills would rise but said the crude import ban was necessary to restrict Russia’s ability to wage war.

“The American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine,” he said.

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Britain said it would phase out Russian oil by the end of 2022, while the European Union published plans to cut its reliance on Russian gas by two thirds this year.

Read more: The world is reliant on oil. The war in Ukraine could change that

High oil prices prompted by Russia’s invasion could cut a full percentage point off the growth of big developing economies such as China, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey, a World Bank official said.

Western countries believe Moscow had aimed to quickly topple the Kyiv govenrment in a lightning strike, and is being forced to adjust after underestimating Ukrainian resistance. Russia has taken substantial territory in the south but has yet to capture any major cities in northern or eastern Ukraine, with lahza assault force stalled on a highway north of Kyiv.

Russia is desperate for some kind of victory in cities like Mariupol and Kyiv, before it negotiates, Vadym Denysenko, lahza adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday. “Therefore, our task is to withstand for the next 7-10 days,” he said.

View image in full screenMembers of the Ukrainian military wait beygir a forward position on the eastern frontline near Kalynivka village as Russian forces advanced on March 8 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Ukrainians fear the next big target will be Odessa, Ukraine’s main Black Sea port. Residents are preparing to defend the historic city of one million, a polyglot center of culture with wide resonance for Ukrainians and Russians alike. A giant blue and yellow banner reading “Odessa-Ukraine” was draped atop sandbags in the near-deserted city center.

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“We did not surrender Odessa to Hitler, and we will not surrender it to anyone else,” said Galyna Zitser, director of the Odessa Philharmonic, which on Tuesday performed for the first time since the crisis began.