A building of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was the target of Russian bombardments in Mariupol, a besieged strategic port in southeastern Ukraine, a Ukrainian official said on Wednesday March 30.
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“The occupants deliberately shelled an ICRC building in Mariupol“, Wrote on Telegram Lioudmyla Denissova, in charge of human rights at the Ukrainian Parliament. “Enemy planes and artillery shelled the building, marked with a red cross on a white background, which is equivalent to the presence of wounded, civilian or humanitarian materialshe continued, adding an aerial image of a building marked with a red cross on the roof. “At this time, we have no information regarding the victims.“, she said, without specifying how many people could have been in the building at the time of the shots.
A spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Geneva confirmed to AFP that the image shown showed an ICRC warehouse in Mariupol. “We don’t have a team on the ground so we don’t have any other information, including casualties or potential damage,” she said. According to this spokesperson, all the humanitarian aid stored in the building had already been distributed.
160,000 civilians blocked
This information is unverifiable from an independent source, Mariupol being besieged by the Russian army since the end of February with faulty communications. In this strategic port on the Sea of Azov, some 160,000 civilians remain stranded under bombs, holed up in shelters without electricity and lacking food and water, according to testimonies collected by AFP from people who were able to flee the town. The conditions for launching a humanitarian operation in the coming days to help the inhabitants of Mariupol do not “are not met at this stage“, said Tuesday evening the French presidency, after a new telephone conversation between the French presidents Emmanuel Macron and Russian Vladimir Poutine.
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In a joint initiative with Turkey and Greece, Emmanuel Macron asked to quickly organize an evacuation of the inhabitants of the city. But Vladimir Putin felt that such an operation required that “Ukrainian nationalist fighters cease all resistance and lay down their arms“, According to a statement from the Kremlin on Tuesday evening.