The reported attack came despite Russia agreeing to a 12-hour pause in hostilities to allow refugees to evacuate a number of towns and cities.
Mariupol’s city council posted a video of the destroyed hospital in the city, accusing Russian troops of dropping several bombs from the sky.
“The devastation is enormous,” said the municipality. “The building of the medical facility where the children were recently treated has been completely destroyed.”
Zelensky reiterated his call for the NATO military alliance to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
“Direct attack by Russian troops on the maternity hospital,” he told Telegram. “People, children lie under the wreckage. Cruelty! How long will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror?
“Close the sky right now! Stop the killings! You have power, but you seem to be losing humanity.”
The strategic port city of Mariupol on Ukraine’s southeast coast has been under siege for days and has been “isolated” by Russian forces, a senior US defense official said Tuesday.
Russia continues to bomb Mariupol and its troops are not “in any significant way” in the city, the official added.
Residents have been cut off from water and electricity for days, and on Tuesday Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba accused Russia of committing war crimes by holding 300,000 civilians “hostage”.
“The situation in Mariupol is hopeless,” Mirella Hodeib, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told DailyExpertNews on Monday.
Evacuation corridors
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said both sides had agreed to a ceasefire and planned evacuation corridors from a number of cities to allow people to leave.
The attempted evacuation corridors are now said to operate from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time, and routes include Energodar to Zaporizhia; Mariupol to Zaporizhzhya; Volnovacha to Pokrovsk; Izium to Lozova; and four separate routes from Vorzel, Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka and Gostomel to the capital Kiev.
There would also be a corridor between Sumy and Poltava, a route that allowed about 5,000 Ukrainians to evacuate on Tuesday, said Deputy President Kirill Timoshenko of Ukraine’s presidential office.
But hours after the evacuation was due to begin, there were no signs that people from Vorzel, Borodyanka, Hostomel, Irpin and Bucha were being brought into the bus convoys that had been organized.
Bucha’s city government accused Russian troops of blocking the evacuation in a statement posted on Facebook.
“The residents are disrupting the evacuation. Currently, 50 buses are blocked by Russian soldiers in the parking lot,” the message reads.
An attempted evacuation from Demidova, a city north of Kiev that did not belong to the agreed corridors, ran into problems. Regional authorities said a police officer was killed and two others were seriously injured in an attempt to evacuate civilians.
In the east, it was impossible to evacuate civilians from the city of Izium “because we constantly hear explosions,” said Oleh Syniehubov, administrative head of the Kharkiv region.
However, it appeared that more progress had been made in organizing buses to get people out of the central city of Enerhodar, as well as Irpin and Vorzel.
“The evacuation from the city continues,” Irpin mayor Оleksandr Markushyn wrote on Facebook. “There are buses in the center of Irpin. We are evacuating as many people as possible.”
In Vorzel, all children stranded in an orphanage have been evacuated, as well as the local maternity hospital, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, an adviser in the president’s office.
At least 2 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the invasion began, the UN estimates. But millions of others are still trapped in towns and cities that have been under constant attack by Russian forces in recent days.
And on Tuesday, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov claimed more than 400 civilians have been killed, including 38 children, and the real death toll is expected to be higher.
Reznikov accused Russia of “a genuine act of genocide” and “war crimes”, alleging that Russian troops fired on the evacuation corridors.
Kharkiv surrounded
The city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine is surrounded by Russian troops and continues to be hit by shelling, the Defense Ministry tweeted Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Kharkiv Mayor Igot Terekhov told DailyExpertNews that the situation was “difficult” and that there was “constant shelling of heavy artillery” on residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
“They touch our water, heating and gas supplies,” Terekhov said. “They’re trying to cut our power.”
Kharkiv is home to 1.5 million people, Terekhov said, adding that utilities were working to keep people warm as the cold weather approaches.
Terekhov said he considers indiscriminate shelling “an act of genocide”. He added that any help or assistance would be gratefully received and expressed hope for the final outcome.
“I am absolutely sure that we will beat the Russians,” he added.
Zelensky calls for action to prevent ‘catastrophe’
Russian forces also continue to attack the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and on Tuesday the head of the Kiev Regional Military Administration, Oleksiy Kuleba, said the humanitarian situation in the areas around the city remains difficult.
“The main problem today remains humanitarian aid. Bucha, Irpin, Gostomel, Makariv, Borodyanka, Vorzel – residents of these settlements are forced to spend days in air raid shelters without water and food. The occupiers do not provide humanitarian corridors, do not give guarantees,” Kuleba said, naming five districts north and west of Kiev.
These five districts were listed on Wednesday as one of the evacuation corridors agreed upon by Ukraine and Russia.
Also on Wednesday, Zelensky reiterated his call for military intervention by Western allies.
“Ukraine has said this to its partners from the first day of the war: if you don’t close the sky, you are also responsible for this catastrophe, a huge humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
The Ukrainian government, meanwhile, has announced it will ban the export of key agricultural commodities, including wheat, maize, grains, salt and meat, after it passed a cabinet resolution on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s Minister of Agricultural Policy and Food, Roman Leshchenko, said steps have been taken “to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine” and to “meet the population’s needs for crucial food items”.
Harris travels to Poland
US Vice President Kamala Harris plans to meet Ukrainian refugees in Poland, on a trip complicated by a fight over a plan to supply fighter jets to Ukraine.
Kiev is asking for the planes to better cope with the Russian invasion, and Poland has proposed transferring its Soviet-era MiG planes to Ukraine, with the US acting as an intermediary.
But the proposal completely caught Biden’s government officials by surprise and was rejected by the Pentagon.
Harris will discuss the thorny issue this week, senior government officials said before her departure.
“A number of people had different ideas and we think they are all worth discussing and that is what we will continue to do,” said an official.
Michael Conte, Josh Campbell, Hannah Ritchie, Julia Kesa, Kevin Liptak, Anastasia Graham-Yooll and Sarah Dean of DailyExpertNews contributed to this report.
