A pregnant woman who was caught in a Russian air strike that hit a children’s hospital and maternity ward in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last Wednesday has died along with her baby.
A photograph of the woman being evacuated from the hospital on a stretcher, taken by photographer Evgeniy Maloletka for the Associated Press, was widely circulated and has become a symbol of Russia’s increasingly brutal tactics in its invasion of Ukraine.
Timur Marin, the surgeon who treated the woman, told the AP that the baby was delivered by caesarean section but showed no signs of life. Marin said doctors then tried to resuscitate the mother, who had a crushed pelvis and detached hip.
“More than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother didn’t produce results,” Marin told the AP. “Both died.”
The air strike destroyed a maternity hospital, children’s ward and therapy centre on March 9. After the attack, the woman was rushed to another hospital where doctors tried to keep her alive.
The medics did not manage to record the woman’s name before her husband and father came to take away her body, according to the AP. Doctors said she was not buried in the mass graves that local authorities have started using owing to the number of fatalities in Mariupol.
The humanitarian situation in the port city of Mariupol has been deteriorating, with hundreds of thousands of residents trapped under heavy bombardment without power, heat, water or communications since early March. Water, medicines and other essential goods are running out.
Sajid Javid, UK health secretary, accused Russia of carrying out more than 30 attacks on Ukrainian health facilities and said Vladimir Putin, Russian president, would be held responsible for war crimes.
“It’s a war crime, because under international law you cannot attack health facilities,” Javid told Sky News on Monday. “The World Health Organization . . . [has] documented evidence of at least 31 such attacks.”
The Russian embassy in the UK claimed photos of the Mariupol hospital bombing was staged in a series of posts on social media.
The embassy also claimed that another pregnant woman photographed escaping a blast in the hospital — and later photographed with her newborn baby — was an actress. Twitter and Facebook removed the posts made by the Russian embassy last Thursday, stating that they violated company policies.
There have been three attempts at evacuating citizens of Mariupol in the past week. Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of attacking evacuation columns.
However, Russian forces have allowed some of the people trapped in the city, which is on the Sea of Azov, to evacuate as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators resumed peace talks. More than 160 private cars left the city and evacuated civilians towards Zaporizhzhya, Mariupol’s city council said. But hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped.
