A six-year-old girl has died from dehydration in her home after her mother was killed in the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine, officials have said.
The country's President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the death this morning in a video address, and said the girl's mother had been killed in the constant airstrikes a few days ago. Officials in the city of Mariupol, which has been bombarded by Russian forces for a week or more now, said the girl was 'alone, weak, frightened, thirsty', before she died, reported the Mirror.
The port city is a key target for Russian forces following their illegal invasion of Ukraine - it links Crimea with the territories they seized in 2014 in the east of the country. Mariupol has been left without electricity, heating or water supplies and the residents are trapped - Putin's forces have repeatedly set up 'escape corridors' and then bombed the civilians as they tried to leave.
Read more: Tributes paid to East Street cafe legend George
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”.
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.”
Read more: Russia Ukraine war LIVE: President Zelensky addresses House of Commons
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 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.
Follow the latest updates on this story and others like it here
Read more: Severn Barrage tidal energy plans back on the agenda as part of a Western Powerhouse
Read more: £95m for Temple Quarter regeneration 'imminent' as talks over cash from government 'very productive'
