A newborn baby fell victim to Russia’s latest unforgiving missile attack on Ukraine early Wednesday, a bombardment that Ukrainian authorities say also killed three people in the capital, including a 17-year-old girl.
“Grief fills our hearts—a baby who had just appeared in the world has been killed,” Oleksandr Starukh, the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, wrote on Telegram after a missile struck a maternity hospital in Vilniansk in the southeast of the country.
The baby was just two days old, according to the Ukrainian presidential administration, meaning it was likely conceived at the start of the war that has now claimed its life.
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The mother, her doctor, and the newborn were rescued from under the rubble after the Wednesday morning attack, but the baby later died, according to Reuters. The attack destroyed the two-story facility and also left two doctors injured, Ukrainian authorities said.
“Horrible pain,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, tweeted Wednesday. “We will never forget and never forgive.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said the hospital was targeted with an S-300 missile. “A baby was killed, a new mother and a doctor were wounded,” the office posted on Telegram.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of “terror and murder,” and said the strike on the hospital was targeted. “As a result of a missile attack on the maternity ward of Vilnyansk hospital, an infant died and a woman was injured,” he wrote Wednesday on Telegram. “There are probably still people under the rubble.”
The attack was reminiscent of a strike on a maternity ward in Mariupol at the start of the full-scale invasion, which became emblematic of Russia’s indiscriminate use of weapons and lack of conventional battlefield norms that exclude civilian targets like hospitals and schools as targets.
The strike on Vilniansk was quickly followed by a steady bombardment of attacks on other cities in multiple regions, leaving numerous cities cut off from power. In Kyiv, at least three people were killed and another 11 wounded when a two-story building took a direct hit, authorities said. Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko posted on Telegram that 10 people were hospitalized and one person was treated at the scene. “Three people were killed as a result of today’s missile shelling of the capital,” he wrote on Telegram. “A 17-year-old girl was among them.”
The U.K. Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that Russia may be running short on supplies after a brutal attempt to knock out Ukraine’s infrastructure ahead of the cold winter months. “Russia has likely very nearly exhausted its current stock, but will probably seek resupply,” the ministry said in a statement.
During his weekly audience in Rome, Pope Francis compared the latest attack to the “terrible genocide of the 1930s” when Soviet leader Josef Stalin used famine to starve people in the same region, saying today the Ukrainian people were victims of a “martyrdom of aggression.”
Also on Wednesday, the head of the United Nations nuclear agency met a Russian delegation in Istanbul over concerns about continuing fighting near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—the largest in Europe—not far from where the maternity hospital was hit. Russia and Ukraine blame each other for the fighting near the plant.
