Ukrainians flee amid attack on maternity hospital

A RUSSIAN attack severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukraine has said.

It comes as citizens trying to escape shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv streamed toward the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter there were “people, children under the wreckage” of the hospital and called the strike an “atrocity”.

Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded.

Video footage shared by Mr Zelensky showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal and room after room with blown-out windows. Floors were covered in wreckage. Outside, a small fire burned and debris covered the ground.

Mariupol’s city council said on its social media site that the damage was “colossal”.

Authorities announced new cease-fires yesterday morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv as well as the southern cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast.