A Russian airstrike that hit a Mariupol maternity hospital brought further condemnation of Moscow Thursday, with Ukrainian and Western officials branding it a war crime while the highest-level talks to date between the two sides yielded no progress in stopping the fighting.
Emergency workers renewed efforts to get food and medical supplies into besieged cities and get traumatized civilians out.
Ukrainian authorities said a child was among three killed in Wednesday's attack in the southern port city of Mariupol. Another 17 people were wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors and children buried in the rubble.
Images of pregnant women covered in dust and blood dominated news reports in many countries and brought a new wave of horror at the two-week-old war sparked by Russia's invasion.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have reportedly been killed, although exact death tolls are hard to verify. The war has driven more than two million people from Ukraine and shaken the foundations of European security.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Russian leaders that the invasion will backfire on them as their economy is strangled. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow to the economy, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee and prices to rise sharply.
"You will definitely be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes," he said in a video address. "And then, it will definitely happen, you will be hated by Russian citizens — everyone whom you have been deceiving constantly, daily, for many years in a row, when they feel the consequences of your lies in their wallets, in their shrinking possibilities, in the stolen future of Russian children."
In addition to those who have fled Ukraine, millions more have been displaced inside the country. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Thursday that about two million people — half the residents of the metro area of the capital — have left the city, which has become virtually a fortress.
"Every street, every house … is being fortified, the territorial defence is joining. Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands," he said in televised remarks.
18 attacks on medical facilities: WHO
Bombs also fell on two hospitals in Zhytomyr, west of the capital, Kyiv, on Wednesday, its mayor said. The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.
Western officials said Russian forces have made little progress on the ground in recent days. But they have intensified the bombardment of Mariupol and other cities, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, with food and water running short.
Temporary ceasefires to allow evacuations have often faltered, with Ukraine accusing Russia of continuing its bombardments. But Zelensky said 35,000 people managed to get out on Wednesday from several besieged towns.
The Mariupol city council posted a video Thursday showing buses driving down a highway, with a note saying that a convoy bringing food and medicine was on the way despite several days of thwarted efforts to reach the city.
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"Everyone is working to get help to the people of Mariupol. And it will come," said Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko.
Images from the city, where hundreds have died, according to city officials, and some victims have been buried in a mass grave, have drawn condemnation from around the world.
Residents have resorted to breaking into shops for food or melting snow for water. The city has been without heat for days as nighttime temperatures fall below freezing and daytime ones hover just above it.
"The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished," Volodymyr Bykovskyi said as he stood by a freshly dug trench where bodies were being buried. "I don't know who's guilty, who's right, who started this. Damn them all, those people who started this!"
'A war crime without any justification'
When the series of blasts hit the children's and maternity hospital in Mariupol, the ground shook more than a kilometre away. Explosions blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying a bleeding woman on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars. Another woman wailed as she clutched her child.
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15 hours agoDuration 2:40Russia has been accused of attacking a maternity and children's hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, endangering the lives of civilians. Russia insists it isn't targeting civilians, but this isn't the first time Moscow has been accused of deliberately hitting hospitals during a conflict. 2:40
Britain's Armed Forces minister, James Heappey, said that whether hitting the hospital was "indiscriminate" fire into a built-up area or a deliberate targeting, "it is a war crime."
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, on a visit to Ukraine's neighbour Poland, backed calls for an international war-crimes investigation into the invasion, saying "the eyes of the world are on this war and what Russia has done in terms of this aggression and these atrocities."
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Polish President Andrzej Duda called the strike on the hospital an "act of barbarity" and said "it is obvious to us, that in Ukraine, Russians are committing war crimes."
Regional Ukrainian police official Volodymir Nikulin, standing in the ruins, called the Mariupol attack "a war crime without any justification."
Russia hits back against criticism
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed concerns about civilian casualties as "pathetic shrieks" from Russia's enemies. He claimed without providing evidence that the Mariupol hospital had been seized by far-right radical fighters who were using it as a base — despite the fact that photographs from the aftermath show pregnant women and children at the site.
Several rounds of talks have not stopped the fighting, and a meeting in a Turkish Mediterranean resort between Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba failed to yield much common ground.
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In their highest-level talks since the war began, Kuleba said the two sides discussed a 24-hour ceasefire but did not make progress. He said Russia was still seeking "a surrender from Ukraine."
"This is not what they are going to get," he said, adding that he was willing to continue the dialogue.
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French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, called for an "immediate ceasefire" in Ukraine, in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.
Lavrov also said Russia was ready for more negotiations but showed no sign of softening Moscow's demands. He said Putin could meet with Zelensky but only after further negotiations about Russia's broader grievances.
Russia has alleged that Western-looking, U.S.-backed Ukraine posed a threat to its security — but Western officials suspect Putin would like to install a government friendly to Moscow in Kyiv as part of efforts to draw the ex-Soviet state back into its orbit.
Anger in Kharkiv
Russia's military is struggling, facing heavier losses and stronger Ukrainian resistance than it apparently anticipated. But Putin's forces have used airpower to pummel key cities, often shelling populated areas.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, 91-year-old Alevtina Shernina sat wrapped in a blanket, an electric heater at her feet, as cold air blew in through a damaged window. She survived the brutal Second World War siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Russia, and is now under siege again, her health too fragile for her to be moved.
Her daughter-in-law, Natalia, said she was angry that Shernina "began her life in Leningrad under the siege as a girl who was starving, who lived in cold and hunger, and she's ending her life" in similar circumstances.
"There were fascists there and there are fascists here who came and bombed our buildings and windows," she said.
Ukraine pleads for access to repair infrastructure
Western countries have sought to hasten the war's end by imposing punishing sanctions on Russia, and a cascade of global companies have abandoned the country, plunging its economy into isolation.
Britain added more oligarchs to its sanctions list, including Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Premier League soccer club Chelsea. The government said Abramovich's assets — including Chelsea — were frozen, he was banned from visiting the U.K., and barred from transactions with U.K. individuals and businesses.
The fighting has repeatedly raised the spectre of a nuclear disaster. It knocked out power to the decommissioned Chornobyl nuclear plant on Wednesday, raising fears about the spent radioactive fuel stored there that must be kept cool. But the UN nuclear watchdog agency said it saw "no critical impact on safety" from the loss of power.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk pleaded Thursday with the Russian military to allow access for repair crews to restore electricity to the plant, and to fix a damaged gas pipeline in the south that has left Mariupol and other towns without heat for days.
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