Red Cross building shelled by Russians in Mariupol, kyiv says

A building of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was the target of Russian bombardments in Mariupol, a strategic port in the south-east of Ukraine, a Ukrainian official said on Wednesday. “The occupants deliberately bombarded an ICRC building in Mariupol”, wrote on Telegram Lioudmyla Denisova, 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 material,” she continued, adding an image view of a building marked with a red cross on the roof. “For the moment, we have no information concerning the victims,” ​​she said, without specifying how many people could have been in the building at the time of the shooting.

To have : War in Ukraine: New images of the devastation of Mariupol seen from the sky

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 to launch in the coming days a humanitarian operation to help the inhabitants of Mariupol “are not met at this stage”, indicated Tuesday evening the French presidency, after a new telephone conversation between the French presidents Emmanuel Macron and Russian Vladimir Putin. . In a joint initiative with Turkey and Greece, Mr. 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 Kremlin press release on Tuesday evening.