Featured Image Credit: Alamy/7 News
Topics: Ukraine, Russia, no-article-matching, Vladimir Putin
Poppy Bilderbeck
Topics: Ukraine, Russia, no-article-matching, Vladimir Putin
Ukrainian authorities have claimed that Russian forces have bombed a psychiatric hospital containing more than 300 people.
Governor of the region, Oleh Synegybov, has alleged 330 were people inside the hospital at the time of the attack.
He said 73 people were evacuated from the facility located in Oskil, which is near to the town of Izyum in the region of Kharkiv. However, some were reportedly left behind unable to move due to being confined to wheelchairs.
The news follows soon after a bombing attack on a children's hospital in Mariupol which is reported as having taken the lives of three people, including a child, and injuring multiple others.
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Synegybov has called the latest incident a 'brutal attack on civilians, a war crime against civilians, [and a] genocide against the Ukrainian nation'.
Synegybov claimed that Kharkiv has seen as many as 89 shelling attacks in one single day, The Independent reports.
Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, also stated that the city has seen 48 schools destroyed.
Terekhov told CNN: 'There are constant air raids, constant fire on residential neighbourhoods, a constant fire on the civilian infrastructure.
'They’re hitting our water and heating and gas supply. They’re trying to interrupt our power supplies.'
Russia has yet to respond to Ukraine's claims that it bombed the psychiatric hospital in Kharkiv, however in response to the bombing of the maternity and children's hospital in Mariupol, Russia’s first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, took to Twitter to brand the reports as 'fake news'.
He stated: 'That’s how fake news is born. We warned in our statement back on 7 March that this hospital has been turned into a military object by radicals.
'Very disturbing that UN spreads this information without verification.'
The Russian embassy was later criticised and had tweets removed by Twitter after making false claims about victims caught in the hospital attack.
Governor Synegybov's words echo those of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
After the Mariupol attack, the leader stated: 'Europeans, you can't say you didn't see what is happening. You have to tighten the sanctions until Russia can't continue their savage war.
'What kind of country bombs hospitals? [...] Was it the ''denazification'' of a hospital? What the Russians did at Mariupol was beyond savagery.'
So far, NATO has still not reversed its decision to not enforce a no-fly zone above Ukraine, despite the devastation the ongoing air attacks are causing. The total number of casualties from the latest attack remains 'unclear' according to a local official, as per a tweet by journalist Leonid Ragozin. While the fire is reported as having been 'extinguished', some patients are still 'waiting for evacuation'.
If you would like to donate to the Red Cross Emergency Appeal, which will help provide food, medicines and basic medical supplies, shelter and water to those in Ukraine, click here for more information