Kyiv: Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that a maternity ward of a hospital in southern Ukraine was hit by rockets overnight. The child’s mother and a doctor were pulled alive from the debris. The governor of the region said the rockets were Russian. The strike in Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhya, adds to the horrific toll the Russian offensive is taking on hospitals and other medical facilities and their patients and staff, entering its tenth month this week. They have been in the firing line since the beginning, including a March 9 airstrike that destroyed a maternity hospital in the now-occupied port city of Mariupol. Writing on the Telegram messaging app, regional governor Oleksandr Starukh said, “Grief overwhelms our hearts, the death of a child who had just seen the light of day. Rescuers are working at the site.”
Photos posted by him showed thick smoke rising from the top of a mound of debris, which was being combed by emergency workers against a background of a dark night sky.
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The State Emergency Service initially said that a baby had died and that a new mother and a doctor had been pulled from the rubble, and were the only people in the ward at the time. Seva specified in a follow-up post on Telegram that the rescued woman was the mother of the newborn.