Emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the rubble
(Picture: AP)Russian commanders suspected of shelling a hospital in Ukraine were today branded the “Monsters of Mariupol” as Britain declared the atrocity a war crime.
At least three people including a six-year-old child were killed, according to local officials.
Armed forces minister James Heappey said that military commanders involved in the attack, believed to have been carried out by Russia, would face charges for breaking the laws of war.
The destruction of the hospital, where women were waiting to give birth and which reportedly left children buried in the rubble, has sparked global outrage.
Speaking on Sky News, Mr Heappey said: “What you see on your TV screens is a war crime.
“Now, clearly there is evidence to be gathered to prove that it is a war crime and western countries are working together to make sure that that evidence is gathered in the best way so that people can be held to account.”
The World Health Organisation said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.
Sir Bob Neill MP, chairman of the Commons justice committee, told the Evening Standard: “Not just Putin must be brought to justice for these crimes, the same must apply to everyone down the chain of command who is responsible.
“That is what we did with Milosevic and his commanders, the Butchers of the Balkans, who were brought to justice...the same must happen to the Monsters of Mariupol.”
Ukrainian officials said the attack at a medical complex in Mariupol killed three people, including a six-year-old, and wounded at least 17 people.
The ground shook more than a mile away when the series of blasts hit. 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 with a swollen belly on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars. Another woman cried desperately as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two stories deep.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky described the attack, believed to be from artillery, as an “atrocity”.
He reiterated his call to Western nations to impose a no-fly zone in the skies over Ukraine, or his country could “lose millions of people”.
Condemning the attack, Boris Johnson tweeted: “There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless.” In other developments today:
There were reports of new air strikes on Mariupol, with claims that Russia had seized part of the port city.
Ukrainian forces are inflicting “continued losses” on a 40-mile column of Russian tanks and other military vehicles around 18 miles from the capital Kyiv, said British defence chiefs.
Ukraine is opening seven “humanitarian corridors” today to help civilians leave cities besieged by Russian forces, including Mariupol, said the country’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk. “We’ll pray we can get people out of Mariupol,” said Mr Zelensky of the city which has been under siege for nine days and is home to nearly half a million people, many struggling to find food, with no electricity or running water.
More than 1,200 civilians are feared to have been killed in Mariupol, with mass graves being dug. Hundreds, if not thousands more have been killed in other towns and cities.
On Russia’s collapsing economy, the country’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who held talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in Turkey today, said Moscow would “take care about that ourselves”.
Mr Heappey confirmed that Britain is exploring the possibility of swiftly donating super-fast Starstreak missiles to Ukraine’s military.
Russian defence chiefs have confirmed the use of the thermobaric TOS-1A weapon system in Ukraine, according to the Ministry of Defence in London.
Mr Lavrov made the unsubstantiated claim that children and women had been moved out of the Mariupol hospital before it was destroyed. This flew in the face of countless images and reports of the atrocity and casualties.
Meanwhile, nuclear safety watchdogs said they had lost contact with the captured Zaporizhzhia power plant, just hours after warning they had also lost touch with its systems which monitor nuclear material at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
British soldiers who have gone AWOL to fight in Ukraine were today warned they risked giving Vladimir Putin “an excuse” to argue that they are a proxy force. Mr Heappey said what they were doing was illegal and they faced disciplinary action. Three or four UK soldiers are believed to have been heading to Ukraine, including a 19-year-old Coldstream Guardsman who was based in Windsor barracks.
In a warning to those who have gone absent without leave, Mr Heappey told LBC Radio: “Do not think that you are helping things in the slightest, because you are not by giving Putin an excuse to say that this is some sort of, you know, proxy little green men which is a Russian tactic.
“He will be so quick to label these AWOL soldiers as our version of the little green men that he’s had destabilising the Donbas (region of eastern Ukraine) for the last eight years.”
It came as Russia buried an 18-year-old ex-conscript — its youngest declared victim of the war so far — amid a row over sending teenage soldiers to their deaths in Ukraine. Yegor Pochkaenko was killed the day before his 19th birthday, after being moved 5,360 miles across his country to fight in Putin’s conflict. He is one of only a handful of dead Russian soldiers whose identities have been made public, and still fewer whose funerals have been pictured.
Russia has failed to give reliable figures on its losses in a war it calls a “special military operation”, but the US has estimated the toll to be up to 6,000, with a vast number wounded.
Pochkaenko was hailed a “hero” in his home town of Belogorsk in Amur region, but the acknowledgement of his death comes amid a dispute over the deployment of conscripts, some of whom are allegedly dragooned to enlist as contract soldiers.
Andrey Dyumin, deputy prime minister of Amur region, said: “He defended us all: our country, our residents.
“Unfortunately, the short peaceful periods of life in our country have always been replaced by a series of wars.”
