A girl, six, has died from dehydration "alone, weak, frightened, thirsty" in Ukraine's besieged city of Mariupol after spending days with no water, power, or heating supplies.
Last week Russian forces cornered the port city with constant airstrikes, leaving residents without energy and water, with no way to evacuate.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the child's death this morning in a video address and officials later said her name was Tanya.
"In 2022, from dehydration," he said, likening the humanitarian crisis linked to Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities to that created by the Nazi invasion during World War Two.
The city's mayor, Vadym Boychenko, later said: “Her mother was killed. We don’t know how long the girl was fighting for her life.
"We can’t imagine how much suffering she had to bear. In the last minutes of her life she was alone, weak, frightened, thirsty.”
He said the child's death was “one of many tragic stories of Mariupol, the city surviving in a blockade for the past eight days”.
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Mr Boychenko said: “Russian invaders have cynically left the city of half a million without water, light, heat and communications. All routes into the city are blocked. All efforts to deliver food and medicine to the residents of the city were blocked by the Russian army.”
His statement said the girl had no water, electricity, heating or mobile connection and accuses Russian forces of blocking evacuation & humanitarian deliveries.
Mariupol's council last week said in a statement that Russian forces were: "breaking food supplies, setting us up in a blockade, as in the old Leningrad".
"Deliberately, for seven days, they have been destroying [Mariupol's] critical life-support infrastructure.
"We have no light, water or heat again," it added.
"Mariupol remains under fire. Women, children and the elderly are suffering. We are being destroyed as a nation. This is genocide of the Ukrainian people," the statement concluded.
The city is home to an estimated 400,000 and is a key target for Russia as its capture would allow Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine to join troops in Crimea, the southern peninsula annexed in 2014.
The opening of humanitarian corridors have come as a ray of hope for Ukrainians trapped by fighting since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Thirty buses are currently en route to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol to collect evacuees via a humanitarian corridor to Ukraine-controlled territory, deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on television on Tuesday.
Moscow calls its actions in Ukraine a "special military operation" to disarm its neighbour and arrest leaders it calls "neo-Nazis".
It denies targeting civilians.
But reports have come out this morning of yet another devastating airstrike, which has left 21 people dead, including two children.
Russian pilots last night 'dropped 500-kilogram bombs' on the Ukrainian city of Sumy.
Footage taken at the scene of the shelling shows the devastating aftermath of the attack, with small bodies being pulled from the rubble and blood-splattered rocks.
One of a team of men working to excavate the bodies is seen gently lying a blanket over the face of an unmoving body, before moving away to help elsewhere.
A video of the scene, too graphic for the Mirror to show, was shared to Twitter by Ukraine’s Ambassador to Austria, Olexander Scherba, who described it as the “Barbaric bombardment”.
