A newborn baby was killed by a Russian strike on a maternity ward in the Zaporizhia region of southern Ukraine, Ukrainian emergency services said on Wednesday. Her mother was rescued from the rubble.
Like a flashback. After the attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital last March, a Ukrainian newborn was killed in a small maternity hospital in the city of Vilniansk, in the Zaporizhia region, intensely targeted by Russian bombs. On the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, “a two-storey building housing a maternity ward was destroyed by a missile attack in the area of the local hospital”, the state service for emergencies said on Telegram. “As a result of the attack, the baby born in 2022 died”, according to the same source. A doctor and the infant’s injured mother were rescued from the rubble. According to several Ukrainian sources, the baby was a two-day-old baby boy.
“The terrorist state continues to wage war on civilians., lambasted the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on Telegram. Emergency services have released a video showing rescuers trying to free a man half buried in the debris. The small town of Vilniansk is located in the north of the Zaporijjia region, most of which in the south is occupied by Russian troops while Moscow has announced the annexation of this territory.
Winter threatens the lives of millions of Ukrainians
On November 17, a Russian strike had already destroyed a building there, killing ten people, including three children. In the Kharkiv region (northeast), another Russian bombardment on Wednesday morning killed two people, a 55-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man, regional governor Oleg Synegoubov said on Telegram. One person was hospitalized, another received first aid on the spot, the governor said, according to which the bombing hit a residential building and a hospital.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday it had recorded more than 700 attacks on Ukrainian health facilities since the start of the Russian invasion in February, which it says constitutes “a manifest violation” international humanitarian law. “Hundreds of hospitals and health facilities are no longer fully operational”WHO regional director for Europe Hans Kluge told reporters at a press conference in Kyiv.
The WHO had also warned that winter will threaten the lives of millions of Ukrainians, after a series of devastating Russian strikes on the country’s energy infrastructure which regularly plunges into darkness and cold. “This winter will endanger the lives of millions of people in Ukraine”had alerted Hans Kluge. “Put simply, this winter will be about survival.” Damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure “already have devastating effects on the health system and on the health of the population”he pointed out.
Updated at 11 a.m.: adding context
.