Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed fresh hell on Ukrainian civilians Wednesday — this time targeting helpless mothers and babies by bombing a maternity hospital, prompting Ukraine’s leader to again demand the world help.
“People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted of the carnage in the already-besieged coastal city of Mariupol — where bodies are piling up so fast that locals have begun burying them in mass graves.
“How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power but you seem to be losing humanity,” he wrote in a clear rebuke to Western allies’ refusal to institute a no-fly zone over the area to combat Russian fighter jets.
At least 17 people were wounded, including women in labor, said regional Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko.
He accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting the maternity hospital, which has a pediatric unit and was “literally destroyed,” Agence France-Presse said.
Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher.
Another woman wailed as she clutched her child.
“Today Russia committed a huge crime,” said a regional police official, Volodymir Nikulin, standing in the wreckage. “It is a war crime without any justification.
The airstrike occurred during what was supposed to be a regional cease-fire in the already “apocalyptic’’ city to allow safe evacuations of thousands of innocent residents.
But Putin’s troops have repeatedly violated their pledge to stop attacks along the safety corridors — to the point where local officials are now using mass graves to bury some of the thousands they say have been killed in “pure genocide.’’
The city’s official Telegram page posted a devastating apparent video of Wednesday’s bombing, too, including footage that showed a giant gaping mound of earth where part of the building had stood, with a car still in flames.
“The Russian occupying forces have dropped several bombs on the children’s hospital. The destruction is colossal,” the site said.
US officials harshly condemned the bombing.
“As a mother — I know a number of you are mothers — it is horrifying to see the barbaric use of military force to go after innocent civilians in a sovereign country,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a daily press briefing.
While Ukraine insisted that Russian forces deliberately targeted the hospital, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed Wednesday, “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.”
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby, asked about the issue at a separate briefing, said, “Obviously that’s a horrific outcome. regardless of whether it was intentional or not.
“If it’s true — we have no reason to doubt that it’s true — we just can’t independently verify, it’s just another indicator of the supreme sacrifices that the Ukrainian people are making that they shouldn’t have to make. We’re talking, you know, families, children, killed, wounded, displaced, all of it, all of it avoidable. All of it completely avoidable.”
Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba called the hospital attack a “petrifying war crime” while appealing for more help from other world leaders.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted after the carnage, “There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenseless.
“The UK is exploring more support for Ukraine to defend against airstrikes and we will hold {Russian President Vladimir] Putin to account for his terrible crimes.”
The bombing came soon after World Health Organization head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the agency had already “verified 18 attacks” on healthcare facilities, workers and ambulances — including 10 deaths and 16 injuries.
“The health system is becoming engulfed in this conflict,” said the WHO’s executive director of health emergencies, Dr. Michael Ryan.
Those attacks started on the first day Russia invaded, when four people were killed and another 10 injured when a cluster munition struck a hospital in Vuhledar, according to Human Rights Watch.
It even included another maternity hospital, when at least two people died when one in Zhytomyr was destroyed March 2, The Independent noted.
“If it’s not a genocide, what is that?” Ukraine’s foreign ministry had tweeted as it shared footage of that earlier carnage.
Russia has a long track record of such attacks on innocents, killing 27 people — mostly newborns and mothers — in a 1999 bombing of a maternity hospital in Grozny, Chechnya, the New Republic noted.
Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.
The Kremlin was also accused of “deliberately and systematically” blowing up hospitals while fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2016, with Physicians for Human Rights linking at least 243 such attacks to “either Russian or Syrian government forces.”
The latest brutal assault came after the Red Cross had already decried the “apocalyptic” scenes in Mariupol, where so many have been left dead by the fighting that corpses were being left on the streets.
The latest brutal assault came after the Red Cross had already decried the “apocalyptic” scenes in Mariupol, where so many have been left dead by the fighting that corpses were being left on the streets.
Social workers had buried at least 40 bodies in an 80-foot-long trench Tuesday and another 47 on Wednesday, The Guardian reported. There were no mourners present.
Ukrainian Deputy Mayor Sergiy Orlov told CNN earlier that the mass-grave victims were among 1,207 confirmed dead in the country by late Monday — while predicting the real tally is likely “three to four times more.”
All were civilians “killed on the street,” he said.
“Mariupol is under continuous shelling … each hour, each minute, each second,” he told CNN, saying there was “no cease-fire” despite Russia promising a safe corridor for those wanting to exit.
“This district does not exist anymore. There are no buildings without damage” or are destroyed, he said.
Orlov said he had been unable to contact his own parents for eight days, saying he could only “hope and pray that they are alive.
“The attack being waged by Russia isn’t simply treacherous. It’s a war crime,” Orlov said, according to The Guardian.
“Putin is intent on having Ukraine without Ukrainians. It’s pure genocide.”
Kuleba tweeted earlier Wednesday, “Russia continues holding hostage over 400,000 people in Mariupol, blocks humanitarian aid and evacuation.
“Indiscriminate shelling continues. Almost 3,000 newborn babies lack medicine and food. I urge the world to act! Force Russia to stop its barbaric war on civilians and babies!”
With Post Wires
