MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian airstrike devastated a maternity hospital Wednesday in the besieged port city of Mariupol amid growing warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn. Ukrainian officials said the attack wounded at least 17 people, including women near childbirth.
The ground shook more than a mile away when the Mariupol complex was hit by a series of blasts that blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher as light snow drifted down on burning and mangled cars and trees shattered by the blast.
Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two stories 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 Zelenskyy said the strike trapped children and others under the rubble. Calling the siege of Mariupol “beyond an atrocity,” he used his nightly video address to urge the West to impose even tougher sanctions, so Russia “no longer has any possibility to continue this genocide.”
Video shared by Zelenskyy showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal.
Related Story: Russia denies it bombed Ukrainian maternity hospital: ‘fake news’

An injured pregnant woman walks downstairs in the damaged by shelling maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. A Russian attack has severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials say. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Two weeks into Russia’s war in Ukraine, its military is struggling more than expected, but Putin’s invading force of more than 150,000 troops retains possibly insurmountable advantages in firepower as it bears down on key cities.
Despite often heavy shelling on populated areas, American military officials reported little change on the ground over the past 24 hours, other than Russian progress on the cities of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to assess the larger military situation.
Authorities announced new cease-fires Wednesday to allow thousands of civilians to escape bombarded towns around Kyiv as well as the cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha in the south, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast.
It was not immediately clear whether anyone was able to leave other cities, but people streamed out of Kyiv’s suburbs, many headed for the city center, as explosions were heard in the capital and air raid sirens sounded repeatedly.
From there, the evacuees planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack.
Civilians leaving the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span leading to Kyiv days ago to slow the Russian advance.
With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along, cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. They trudged past a crashed van with the words “Our Ukraine” written in the dust coating its windows.
“We have a short window of time at the moment,’’ said Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces. “Even if there is a cease-fire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.”
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors over the past few days largely failed because of what the Ukrainians said were Russian attacks. But Putin, in a telephone call with Germany’s chancellor, accused militant Ukrainian nationalists of hampering the evacuations.
In Mariupol, a strategic city of 430,000 people on the Sea of Azov, local authorities hurried to bury the dead from the past two weeks of fighting in a mass grave. City workers dug a trench some 25 meters (yards) long at one of the city’s old cemeteries and made the sign of the cross as they pushed bodies wrapped in carpets or bags over the edge.
About 1,200 people have died in the nine-day siege of the city, Zelenskyy’s office said.
Nationwide, thousands are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, since Putin’s forces invaded. The U.N. estimates more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The fighting knocked out power to the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant, raising fears about the spent radioactive fuel that is stored at the site and must be kept cool. But the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said it saw “no critical impact on safety” from the loss of power.
The crisis is likely to get worse as Moscow’s forces step up their bombardment of cities in response to what appear to be stronger Ukrainian resistance and heavier Russian losses than anticipated.
Echoing remarks from the director of the CIA a day earlier, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Russia’s assault will get “more brutal and more indiscriminate” as Putin tries to regain momentum.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said fighting continued northwest of Kyiv. Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol were being heavily shelled and remained encircled by Russian forces.
Russian forces are placing military equipment on farms and amid residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv, Ukraine’s military said. In the south, Russians in civilian clothes are advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people, it said.
The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, is building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive, authorities said.
On Wednesday, some of Ukraine’s volunteer fighters trained in a Kyiv park with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
“I have only one son,” said Mykola Matulevskiy, a 64-year-old retired martial arts coach, who was with his son, Kostyantin. “Everything is my son.”
But now they will fight together: “It’s not possible to have it in another way because it’s our motherland. We must defend our motherland first of all.”
In Irpin, a town of 60,000, police officers and soldiers helped elderly residents from their homes. One man was hoisted out of a damaged structure on a makeshift stretcher, while another was pushed toward Kyiv in a shopping cart. Fleeing residents said they had been without power and water for the past four days.
Regional administration head Oleksiy Kuleba said the crisis for civilians is deepening in and around Kyiv, with the situation particularly dire in the suburbs.
“Russia is artificially creating a humanitarian crisis in the Kyiv region, frustrating the evacuation of people and continuing shelling and bombing small communities,” he said.
The situation is even worse in Mariupol, where efforts to evacuate residents and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine failed Tuesday because of what the Ukrainians said were continued Russian attacks.
The city took advantage of a lull in the shelling Wednesday to hurriedly bury 70 people. Some were soldiers, but most were civilians.
The work was conducted efficiently and without ceremony. No mourners were present, no families to say their goodbyes.
One woman stood at the gates of the cemetery to ask whether her mother was among those being buried. She was.
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Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Felipe Dana and Andrew Drake in Kyiv contributed along with other reporters around the world.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
© 2022 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
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Don’t tell me there isn’t a way to take this guy out because I bet there is. Somebody needs to do it.
We need only hire the political planning expertise of the Democrat leaders of Family Planning Services who currently are more efficient in removing American human babies in the womb with unconstitutional laws, than Putin is with removing Ukrainian babies in the womb via unconstitutional inhuman bombs. Family planning uses their own vacuuming D &C versions of a Russian vacuum bomb, so I’m sure their evil minds could conceive some devious way to take out Putin and get clean away with it like they do in America today in their oxymoronic family planning. Just look at their record of success so far? It’s the same old evil, just meanly done via different means, where collective power and party always rules over individual compassion and sanctity of human life.
Just send in all the leftists social workers.. They’ll talk them to death…
American military uses shock and awe, Putin’s Russians use shock and awful.
Russians still have not figured out that you don’t put a loaded gun into the hands of a child, nor nuclear weapons into the hands of a man with the mind of a criminal.
The only criminal who has done more than Putin to crush America’s ability to energize America and the free world, is Joe Biden. He obviously is being advised on all energy issues for petroleum product independence expertise is his Ukrainian Oil company Burisma educated son Hunter Biden. God help us all.
WE USED to have shock and awe in our military.. THESE DAYS its more like Cower and whine..
When Ukraine falls to Putin, Putin will have nothing to worry about, as his lapdogs in Western Europe and lapdog Joe Biden will keep slobbering all over Putin.
This is just one more example of how little regard for human life Putin and his military animals are. His goal is to totally destroy every man, woman, and child in the country. That will make him feel like a great man, which of course he is far from great.
Hence why when folks started wondering would he allow chernobil to go up, EVEN WITH HIS TROOPS around it, i said HELL YES HE WOULD..
Think about it… Is this something that a military leader which unlike Biden Putin is would waste a lot of time and energy to bomb, or is it just possible that that Ukraine was using that hospital for military purposes of their own, or that our corrupt dishonest media is only reporting it to incite hatred of Putin… Think about it and what ever you do do not believe our media coverage of anything!