I was expecting this to happen anytime to encourage NATO allies to send more weapons along with fighter jets to Ukraine. I don't believe that the Russian military did this. It looks more like a setup. Russian missiles and bombers are just as accurate as ours, they don't attack civilians and rarely miss a LEGITIMATE target. The Russian military would go out of its way to avoid such a catastrophe especially against a maternity hospital, as it would become bad publicity for them around the world. No, I believe that the desperate Neo-Nazi Azov battalion are involved bombing their own people for pity from the world. Remember that the Ukraine military murdered about 14,000 people in Donbas since the 2014 coup-d'etat against President Viktor Yanukovich and the EU and other western nations did nothing. As such, this incident with the hospital convinces me it was a setup against the Russian military. We know the tactics and we know their playbook.
Desperate battle to find survivors trapped in Mariupol maternity hospital: Rescuers comb rubble after 'genocide' bomb blast as temperatures plunge to -4C with fears any injured children will freeze to death
Rescuers are in a race against time to free survivors trapped under the rubble at Mariupol maternity hospital
The complex in the besieged southern port city suffered a 'direct hit' by Russian rockets, Zelensky has said
Footage shows one building totally destroyed and another badly damaged as wounded patients evacuate
Other clips show badly injured nurses being treated while pregnant women are carried out on stretchers
Zelensky said children are trapped under rubble and argued the bombing is proof of 'genocide'
At least 17 people were injured in the attack, including women who were in labour at the time, officials said
Rescuers are now rushing to pull out survivors as temperatures are set to plunge to minus 4 degrees C
Hours earlier, foreign minister had warned 3,000 babies in the city were without access to food or medicine
Residents of Mariupol have been forced to begin burying the dead in mass graves amid the bombardment
Boris Johnson also condemned the strike as 'depraved' and vowed to step up support to the Ukrainian military
By CHRIS PLEASANCE and KATE DENNETT and DAVID AVERRE FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 19:23 EST, 9 March 2022 | UPDATED: 21:32 EST, 9 March 2022
Rescuers on the scene at a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol are locked in a race against time as they try to free survivors from the rubble after the complex suffered a 'direct hit' by Russian rockets yesterday, in what President Zelensky described as an 'atrocity' and 'the ultimate proof of genocide against Ukrainians.'
Footage has emerged of badly wounded patients and nurses being evacuated from decimated buildings, while pregnant women were carried out on stretchers into a courtyard covered in rubble and littered with huge craters.
At least 17 people, including women in labour, were injured in the attack, officials said.
...
Anons > do you think the number17 is coincidence? ..
...
An official death toll has not yet been established but rescuers are working desperately to find and free those still trapped under the rubble with temperatures in the besieged city set to plunge to minus 4 degrees C overnight.
Many of the pregnant women present at the hospital were hiding the the basement at the time of the strike on the orders of hospital authorities - a move indicative of the harsh bombardment suffered by Mariupol's citizens over the past week, and one which likely saved their lives.
Zelensky himself posted a video showing the badly damaged hospital buildings, filmed inside a destroyed ward room with its windows blown out and ceiling partially collapsed. More footage showed a car park covered in rubble and the smouldering wrecks of vehicles as injured families staggered into the freezing air while snow fell.
'Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity! 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,' the President tweeted.
He then took to Telegram, where he released a video statement from the presidential palace in Kyiv in which he said the hospital strike 'is the ultimate proof that what is happening is the genocide of Ukrainians'.
'Europeans, you can't say you didn't see what is happening. You have to tighten the sanctions until Russia can't continue their savage war,' he said.
'What kind of country bombs hospitals? Is afraid of hospitals? Of a maternity ward?
'Was someone insulting Russians? Were pregnant women shooting in direction of Rostov? Was it the ''denazification'' of a hospital? What the Russians did at Mariupol was beyond savagery.'
In a separate interview with Sky News, Zelensky added that Russian invaders want Ukrainians 'to feel like animals' by preventing them from accessing food or water, and implored NATO and the West to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
'They want us to feel like animals because they blocked our cities... because they don't want our people to get some food or water.
'Don't wait for me to ask you several times, a million times, to close the sky. You have to phone us, to our people who lost their children, and say ''sorry we didn't do it yesterday.''
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson meanwhile condemned the strike as 'depraved' and vowed to step up support to the beleaguered Ukrainian military.
'There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless,' the Prime Minister declared.
'The UK is exploring more support for Ukraine to defend against airstrikes and we will hold Putin to account for his terrible crimes,' he added.
Mr Johnson later on Wednesday committed to enacting the 'maximum economic cost' on Russia in wake of the bombing, while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is expected to say aggression like Vladimir Putin's must 'never again' be allowed to 'grow unchecked' in her speech tomorrow in Washington.
Ms Truss will make comparisons between the Russian president's actions and the World Trade Centre terror attack in 2001, and will urge the international community to change its approach to dealing with antagonistic world leaders.
The White House press secretary Jen Psaki also commented: '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.' Mariupol's city council said the hospital had suffered 'colossal' damage but did not immediately give a figure of the wounded and dead.
The deputy head of Mr Zelensky's office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said authorities are trying to establish the number of victims.
Ukrainian MP Dmitry Gurin told the BBC: 'There are a lot of dead and wounded women. We don't know about children or newborns yet.'
Video footage from the aftermath of the attack showed that large parts of the hospital had completely collapsed, while blood soaked mattresses were pictured lying in hallways.
'Russia committed a huge crime,' said Volodymir Nikulin, a top regional police official, standing in the ruins. 'It is a war crime without any justification.'
Mariupol has been under heavy Russian bombardment for more than a week, with food, water and electricity cut off several days ago - with the Red Cross describing conditions there as 'apocalyptic'.
The head of the Ukrainian Red Cross said yesterday's strike will likely cause a complete collapse of paediatric care in Mariupol, as much of the hospital's equipment and the paediatric care wards were reduced to ashes.
Local official Pavlo Kyrylenko confirmed the fears in a post on Facebook: The maternity ward in the city centre, the children's ward and the therapy ward at the hospital - all destroyed in the Russian air raid.'
Just hours before the hospital was hit, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba warned that 3,000 babies were without food or medicines and begged for a humanitarian corridor to allow them to flee.
Moscow had promised a ceasefire in the city today so civilians could be evacuated, but failed for the fourth time to keep its word - a move Kyrylenko said 'crossed the line of humanity' before declaring Russians should 'stop calling yourselves human beings.'
Residents of Mariupol were pictured on Wednesday dumping bodies into mass graves dug on the outskirts of the city in a desperate attempt to remove the dead amid the sustained Russian bombardment.
It is not the first time that Russian airstrikes have targeted hospitals. While fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2016, Putin's generals were accused of 'deliberately and systematically' blowing up hospitals as a way of weakening the city of Aleppo ahead of a ground assault.
Observers have suggested that Russia is now using a Syria-style battleplan against Ukraine after its early precision strikes failed.
The Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a think-tank based in the country, says that between the outbreak of fighting on February 24 and yesterday, their team documented 42 cases of Russian forces attacking either healthcare facilities or medics in order to deliberately provoke a 'humanitarian crisis'.
Hospitals had been struck in every theatre where Russian forces were operating, the think-tank said, including Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv.
'The humanitarian catastrophe is a part of Russia's hybrid war. [It] intends to spread panic, create a flow of refugees at the borders and force the Ukrainian government to surrender,' said Pavlo Kovtonyuk, co-founder of the think-tank.
The bombing took place during what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Mariupol so that civilians could evacuate. It marks the fourth time a so-called 'humanitarian corridor' out of the city has failed because Russian forces opened fire.
The mayor of Izyum, to the east of Kharkiv, said evacuations that were supposed to be underway there yesterday also had to stop because Russians were bombing the escape route. But in Sumy, a short distance away, some civilians had managed to make it out. Successful evacuations also took place in Enerhodar, in the south, with women and children able to leave.
It is feared the evacuations are simply a precursor to Russia stepping up its bombardment of the cities to wear down dogged Ukrainian defenders before rolling in troops and tanks to capture them. CIA Director William Burns, briefing Congress on Putin's state of mind Tuesday, warned the 'angry and frustrated' despot is 'likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.' Giving an update on the military situation yesterday afternoon, Ukrainian commanders said Russian units continue to try and surround the capital Kyiv with attacks taking place to the west and north-east of the city, with several highways blocked.
New footage released on Wednesday purported to show Russian armour just 13 miles from Kyiv as the invaders pushed through the town of Irpin.
Fighting also raged close to the city of Sumy in an attempt to surround Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, commanders said. Battles also broke out around the city of Mykolaiv in the south, as Russians attempted to push out from Kherson towards Odessa but were turned back.
Ukrainian commanders also said Russian military police had rounded up 400 activists protesting against the invasion in the occupied city of Kherson - as the long arm of Vladimir Putin's police state reached across the border to grab people on foreign soil.
Russia's defence ministry meanwhile acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that some conscripts had been sent to fight on the frontlines in Ukraine, just days after Putin promised that only professional soldiers would be sent in.
Some associations of soldiers' mothers in Russia had raised concerns about a number of conscripts going incommunicado at the start of what Kremlin calls a 'special military operation' in Ukraine, suggesting they could have been sent to fight despite a lack of adequate training.
The revelation comes just one week after Russia's parliament passed a law imposing a prison term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally 'fake' news about the military.
'Unfortunately, we have discovered several facts of the presence of conscripts in units taking part in the special military operation in Ukraine. Practically all such soldiers have been pulled out to Russia,' the defence ministry said, promising to prevent such situations in the future.
Liz Truss described the hospital attack as 'absolutely abhorrent', but continued to reject Ukraine's request for a no-fly zone to be imposed over its skies.
Speaking in Washington, she said: 'The best way we can protect the skies is through anti-air weaponry which the UK is now going to be supplying to Ukraine.
'Of course the attack on the hospital is absolutely abhorrent, reckless and appalling.'
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said US involvement in a no-fly zone could 'prolong' the conflict, making it 'even deadlier'.
'Our goal is to end the war, not to expand it, including potentially expanding it to Nato territory,' he said.
'We want to make sure it is not prolonged, to the best of our ability. Otherwise, it is going to turn even deadlier, involve more people and I think potentially even make things harder to resolve in Ukraine itself.'
Earlier, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the MPs that the Ministry of Defence was looking at whether they could supply anti-aircraft missiles as well as more anti-tank weapons.
'We can all see the horrific devastation inflicted on civilian areas by Russian artillery and air strikes, indiscriminate and murderous,' he said.
'It is vital, therefore, that Ukraine maintains its ability to fly and to suppress Russian air attack.'
Mr Wallace said that 'in response to a Ukrainian request' the Government was exploring the donation of Starstreak high-velocity man-portable anti-air missiles.
He also confirmed that 3,615 Nlaw anti-tank weapons had been supplied - up from the previously-announced figure of 2,000 - and 'small consignments' of the Javelin system would also be sent to Ukraine.
Other Western officials expressed concern that Putin could next resort to the use of 'non-conventional weapons' such as chemical weapons, in the conflict.
One official speaking on condition of anonymity said: 'I think we've got good reason to be concerned about possible use of non-conventional weapons, partly because of what we've seen has happened in other theatres.
'As I've mentioned before, for example, what we've seen in Syria, partly because we've seen a bit of setting the scene for that in the false flag claims that are coming out, and other indications as well.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10596473/Desperate-search-survivors-trapped-Mariupol-maternity-hospital-genocide-bomb-blast.html
Desperate battle to find survivors trapped in Mariupol maternity hospital: Rescuers comb rubble after 'genocide' bomb blast as temperatures plunge to -4C with fears any injured children will freeze to death
Rescuers are in a race against time to free survivors trapped under the rubble at Mariupol maternity hospital
The complex in the besieged southern port city suffered a 'direct hit' by Russian rockets, Zelensky has said
Footage shows one building totally destroyed and another badly damaged as wounded patients evacuate
Other clips show badly injured nurses being treated while pregnant women are carried out on stretchers
Zelensky said children are trapped under rubble and argued the bombing is proof of 'genocide'
At least 17 people were injured in the attack, including women who were in labour at the time, officials said
Rescuers are now rushing to pull out survivors as temperatures are set to plunge to minus 4 degrees C
Hours earlier, foreign minister had warned 3,000 babies in the city were without access to food or medicine
Residents of Mariupol have been forced to begin burying the dead in mass graves amid the bombardment
Boris Johnson also condemned the strike as 'depraved' and vowed to step up support to the Ukrainian military
By CHRIS PLEASANCE and KATE DENNETT and DAVID AVERRE FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 19:23 EST, 9 March 2022 | UPDATED: 21:32 EST, 9 March 2022
Rescuers on the scene at a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol are locked in a race against time as they try to free survivors from the rubble after the complex suffered a 'direct hit' by Russian rockets yesterday, in what President Zelensky described as an 'atrocity' and 'the ultimate proof of genocide against Ukrainians.'
Footage has emerged of badly wounded patients and nurses being evacuated from decimated buildings, while pregnant women were carried out on stretchers into a courtyard covered in rubble and littered with huge craters.
At least 17 people, including women in labour, were injured in the attack, officials said.
...
Anons > do you think the number17 is coincidence? ..
...
An official death toll has not yet been established but rescuers are working desperately to find and free those still trapped under the rubble with temperatures in the besieged city set to plunge to minus 4 degrees C overnight.
Many of the pregnant women present at the hospital were hiding the the basement at the time of the strike on the orders of hospital authorities - a move indicative of the harsh bombardment suffered by Mariupol's citizens over the past week, and one which likely saved their lives.
Zelensky himself posted a video showing the badly damaged hospital buildings, filmed inside a destroyed ward room with its windows blown out and ceiling partially collapsed. More footage showed a car park covered in rubble and the smouldering wrecks of vehicles as injured families staggered into the freezing air while snow fell.
'Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity! 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,' the President tweeted.
He then took to Telegram, where he released a video statement from the presidential palace in Kyiv in which he said the hospital strike 'is the ultimate proof that what is happening is the genocide of Ukrainians'.
'Europeans, you can't say you didn't see what is happening. You have to tighten the sanctions until Russia can't continue their savage war,' he said.
'What kind of country bombs hospitals? Is afraid of hospitals? Of a maternity ward?
'Was someone insulting Russians? Were pregnant women shooting in direction of Rostov? Was it the ''denazification'' of a hospital? What the Russians did at Mariupol was beyond savagery.'
In a separate interview with Sky News, Zelensky added that Russian invaders want Ukrainians 'to feel like animals' by preventing them from accessing food or water, and implored NATO and the West to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
'They want us to feel like animals because they blocked our cities... because they don't want our people to get some food or water.
'Don't wait for me to ask you several times, a million times, to close the sky. You have to phone us, to our people who lost their children, and say ''sorry we didn't do it yesterday.''
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson meanwhile condemned the strike as 'depraved' and vowed to step up support to the beleaguered Ukrainian military.
'There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless,' the Prime Minister declared.
'The UK is exploring more support for Ukraine to defend against airstrikes and we will hold Putin to account for his terrible crimes,' he added.
Mr Johnson later on Wednesday committed to enacting the 'maximum economic cost' on Russia in wake of the bombing, while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is expected to say aggression like Vladimir Putin's must 'never again' be allowed to 'grow unchecked' in her speech tomorrow in Washington.
Ms Truss will make comparisons between the Russian president's actions and the World Trade Centre terror attack in 2001, and will urge the international community to change its approach to dealing with antagonistic world leaders.
The White House press secretary Jen Psaki also commented: '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.'
Mariupol's city council said the hospital had suffered 'colossal' damage but did not immediately give a figure of the wounded and dead.
The deputy head of Mr Zelensky's office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said authorities are trying to establish the number of victims.
Ukrainian MP Dmitry Gurin told the BBC: 'There are a lot of dead and wounded women. We don't know about children or newborns yet.'
Video footage from the aftermath of the attack showed that large parts of the hospital had completely collapsed, while blood soaked mattresses were pictured lying in hallways.
'Russia committed a huge crime,' said Volodymir Nikulin, a top regional police official, standing in the ruins. 'It is a war crime without any justification.'
Mariupol has been under heavy Russian bombardment for more than a week, with food, water and electricity cut off several days ago - with the Red Cross describing conditions there as 'apocalyptic'.
The head of the Ukrainian Red Cross said yesterday's strike will likely cause a complete collapse of paediatric care in Mariupol, as much of the hospital's equipment and the paediatric care wards were reduced to ashes.
Local official Pavlo Kyrylenko confirmed the fears in a post on Facebook: The maternity ward in the city centre, the children's ward and the therapy ward at the hospital - all destroyed in the Russian air raid.'
Just hours before the hospital was hit, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba warned that 3,000 babies were without food or medicines and begged for a humanitarian corridor to allow them to flee.
Moscow had promised a ceasefire in the city today so civilians could be evacuated, but failed for the fourth time to keep its word - a move Kyrylenko said 'crossed the line of humanity' before declaring Russians should 'stop calling yourselves human beings.'
Residents of Mariupol were pictured on Wednesday dumping bodies into mass graves dug on the outskirts of the city in a desperate attempt to remove the dead amid the sustained Russian bombardment.
It is not the first time that Russian airstrikes have targeted hospitals. While fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2016, Putin's generals were accused of 'deliberately and systematically' blowing up hospitals as a way of weakening the city of Aleppo ahead of a ground assault.
Observers have suggested that Russia is now using a Syria-style battleplan against Ukraine after its early precision strikes failed.
The Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a think-tank based in the country, says that between the outbreak of fighting on February 24 and yesterday, their team documented 42 cases of Russian forces attacking either healthcare facilities or medics in order to deliberately provoke a 'humanitarian crisis'.
Hospitals had been struck in every theatre where Russian forces were operating, the think-tank said, including Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv.
'The humanitarian catastrophe is a part of Russia's hybrid war. [It] intends to spread panic, create a flow of refugees at the borders and force the Ukrainian government to surrender,' said Pavlo Kovtonyuk, co-founder of the think-tank.
The bombing took place during what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Mariupol so that civilians could evacuate. It marks the fourth time a so-called 'humanitarian corridor' out of the city has failed because Russian forces opened fire.
The mayor of Izyum, to the east of Kharkiv, said evacuations that were supposed to be underway there yesterday also had to stop because Russians were bombing the escape route. But in Sumy, a short distance away, some civilians had managed to make it out. Successful evacuations also took place in Enerhodar, in the south, with women and children able to leave.
It is feared the evacuations are simply a precursor to Russia stepping up its bombardment of the cities to wear down dogged Ukrainian defenders before rolling in troops and tanks to capture them. CIA Director William Burns, briefing Congress on Putin's state of mind Tuesday, warned the 'angry and frustrated' despot is 'likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.'
Giving an update on the military situation yesterday afternoon, Ukrainian commanders said Russian units continue to try and surround the capital Kyiv with attacks taking place to the west and north-east of the city, with several highways blocked.
New footage released on Wednesday purported to show Russian armour just 13 miles from Kyiv as the invaders pushed through the town of Irpin.
Fighting also raged close to the city of Sumy in an attempt to surround Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, commanders said. Battles also broke out around the city of Mykolaiv in the south, as Russians attempted to push out from Kherson towards Odessa but were turned back.
Ukrainian commanders also said Russian military police had rounded up 400 activists protesting against the invasion in the occupied city of Kherson - as the long arm of Vladimir Putin's police state reached across the border to grab people on foreign soil.
Russia's defence ministry meanwhile acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that some conscripts had been sent to fight on the frontlines in Ukraine, just days after Putin promised that only professional soldiers would be sent in.
Some associations of soldiers' mothers in Russia had raised concerns about a number of conscripts going incommunicado at the start of what Kremlin calls a 'special military operation' in Ukraine, suggesting they could have been sent to fight despite a lack of adequate training.
The revelation comes just one week after Russia's parliament passed a law imposing a prison term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally 'fake' news about the military.
'Unfortunately, we have discovered several facts of the presence of conscripts in units taking part in the special military operation in Ukraine. Practically all such soldiers have been pulled out to Russia,' the defence ministry said, promising to prevent such situations in the future.
Liz Truss described the hospital attack as 'absolutely abhorrent', but continued to reject Ukraine's request for a no-fly zone to be imposed over its skies.
Speaking in Washington, she said: 'The best way we can protect the skies is through anti-air weaponry which the UK is now going to be supplying to Ukraine.
'Of course the attack on the hospital is absolutely abhorrent, reckless and appalling.'
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said US involvement in a no-fly zone could 'prolong' the conflict, making it 'even deadlier'.
'Our goal is to end the war, not to expand it, including potentially expanding it to Nato territory,' he said.
'We want to make sure it is not prolonged, to the best of our ability. Otherwise, it is going to turn even deadlier, involve more people and I think potentially even make things harder to resolve in Ukraine itself.'
Earlier, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the MPs that the Ministry of Defence was looking at whether they could supply anti-aircraft missiles as well as more anti-tank weapons.
'We can all see the horrific devastation inflicted on civilian areas by Russian artillery and air strikes, indiscriminate and murderous,' he said.
'It is vital, therefore, that Ukraine maintains its ability to fly and to suppress Russian air attack.'
Mr Wallace said that 'in response to a Ukrainian request' the Government was exploring the donation of Starstreak high-velocity man-portable anti-air missiles.
He also confirmed that 3,615 Nlaw anti-tank weapons had been supplied - up from the previously-announced figure of 2,000 - and 'small consignments' of the Javelin system would also be sent to Ukraine.
Other Western officials expressed concern that Putin could next resort to the use of 'non-conventional weapons' such as chemical weapons, in the conflict.
One official speaking on condition of anonymity said: 'I think we've got good reason to be concerned about possible use of non-conventional weapons, partly because of what we've seen has happened in other theatres.
'As I've mentioned before, for example, what we've seen in Syria, partly because we've seen a bit of setting the scene for that in the false flag claims that are coming out, and other indications as well.'
I was expecting this to happen anytime to encourage NATO allies to send more weapons along with fighter jets to Ukraine. I don't believe that the Russian military did this. It looks more like a setup. Russian missiles and bombers are just as accurate as ours, they don't attack civilians and rarely miss a LEGITIMATE target. The Russian military would go out of its way to avoid such a catastrophe especially against a maternity hospital, as it would become bad publicity for them around the world. No, I believe that the desperate Neo-Nazi Azov battalion are involved bombing their own people for pity from the world. Remember that the Ukraine military murdered about 14,000 people in Donbas since the 2014 coup-d'etat against President Viktor Yanukovich and the EU and other western nations did nothing. As such, this incident with the hospital convinces me it was a setup against the Russian military. We know the tactics and we know their playbook.
(post is archived)