An airstrike on a hospital in the port city of Mariupol killed three people, including a six-year-old child, the city’s council said as Russian forces intensified their siege of Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine's president said Russia is trying to make his people feel 'like animals' by cutting off access to medical help and food.
He called the attack on hospitals in his country 'an atrocity'.
The attack in the besieged southern port city wounded 17 people, including women waiting to give birth, doctors, and children buried in the rubble. Bombs also fell on two hospitals in another city west of the capital.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
Some Ukrainian officials have called the medial facility attacked on Wednesday a children’s hospital, while others have called it a maternity unit. It was not clear if perhaps it hosted both services.
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 wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two floors deep.
“Today 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.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Mariupol strike trapped children and others under debris.
“A children’s hospital. A maternity hospital,” he said in his nightly video address, switching to Russian to express horror at the strike.
“What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”
Sharing video that showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal, Mr Zelensky urged the West to impose even tougher sanctions than the ones that have already plunged its economy into severe isolation, so Russia “no longer has any possibility to continue this genocide”.
He tweeted: "Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital. People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!"
On Telegram 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."
Speaking to Sky News Mr Zelensky said: "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."
Boris Johnson said: "There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless."
Britain’s armed forces minister, James Heappey, said the strike “is a war crime” irregardless of whether it was deliberate or the result of “indiscriminate” fire into a built-up area.
In Zhytomyr, a city of 260,000 to the west of Kyiv, bombs fell on two hospitals, one of them a children’s hospital, mayor Serhii Sukhomlyn said on Facebook. He said there were no injuries.
The WHO said it has confirmed 10 people have been killed and 16 injured in attacks on health facilities and ambulances since the fighting began. It was not clear if its numbers included the assault on the hospital in Mariupol.
Two weeks into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, its military is struggling more than expected, but its President Vladimir Putin’s invading force of more than 150,000 troops retains possibly insurmountable advantages in firepower as it bears down on key cities.
Local authorities hurried to bury the dead from the past two weeks of fighting in a mass grave. Workers dug a trench some 25 metres long at one of the city’s old cemeteries and made the sign of the cross as they pushed in bodies wrapped in carpets or bags.
Nationwide, thousands are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, since Mr Putin’s forces invaded. The UN estimates more than two million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
The fighting knocked out power to the decommissioned Chernobyl 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 on 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.
The crisis is deteriorating as Moscow’s forces intensify their bombardment of cities in response to what appears to be stronger Ukrainian resistance and heavier Russian losses than anticipated.
The Biden administration warned Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine and rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development there.
This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova — without evidence — accused Ukraine of running chemical and biological weapons labs with US. support.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the claim “preposterous” and said Russia might be trying to lay the groundwork for its own use of such weapons against Ukraine.
Russia has admitted using thermobaric weapons, which create huge fireballs that suck the oxygen out of a vast area when deployed.
