100 feared dead as Russian airstrike hits children’s hospital in Ukraine

A Russian airstrike on Wednesday severely damaged a children’s hospital and maternity ward in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, with an unspecified number of children buried in the rubble.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a statement on Twitter described the airstrike an “atrocity.”

Mariupol’s city council said on its social media handle that the death toll could be as high as 100 or more.

READ ALSO: 8 killed, 9 wounded in first Russian airstrike in Ukraine

Ukraine officials said on Wednesday that more people were trying to escape more shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv amid warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion was about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.

“Civilians trying to escape Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to Kyiv days ago to slow the Russian advance,” an official said.

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