A children's hospital and maternity ward in the besieged port city of Mariupol was severely damaged in a ‘direct’ Russian hit, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
The Russian rocket attack left children buried in the rubble, President Zelenskyy said, in what he described as an 'atrocity.' He even posted a video showing the badly damaged hospital buildings, a destroyed ward room with its windows blown out and a ceiling that had partially collapsed. Patients were led out in the freezing air by rescue teams, away from the smouldering debris, western media reports said.
Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded. Mariupol's city council said on its social media site that the damage was "colossal." On the outskirts of Kyiv, meanwhile, citizens were trying to escape shelling and fleeing toward the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow's invasion is about to take a more brutal turn.
Other civilians, trying to escape from the suburb of Irpin, were forced to make their way across slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span 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.
On the other side, they trudged past a crashed van with the words "Our Ukraine" written in the dust coating its windows.
Authorities announced the new ceasefire on Wednesday morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv. Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors largely failed because of Russian attacks.
