Russia Calls Hospital Bombing Fake News, President Zelenskiy: What Kind Of Country Is The Russian Federation?

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy. (Wikimedia Commons / National Guard of Ukraine)

JAKARTA - Russia's war with Ukraine entered its third week on Thursday, as no stated goal has yet been achieved even though thousands of people have been killed, more than two million people have been displaced and thousands more forced to hold on to cities besieged by bombing.

Ukraine says Russia committed 'genocide' by bombing a children's hospital in the city of Mariupol. Meanwhile, Russia said the report was 'fake news', as the building was a former maternity hospital that had long been taken over by troops.

Moscow's stated goal of destroying the Ukrainian military and overthrowing the pro-Western elected government of President Volodymyr Zelensky remains out of reach,

While President Zelenskiy's position was immovable, Western military aid to Ukraine flowed across the borders of Poland and Romania.

Britain's Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that a large Russian convoy northwest of Kyiv had made little progress in more than a week and was continuing to suffer losses. He added that as casualties increased, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to withdraw from the entire armed forces to avoid losses.

President Zelenskiy accused Russia of "genocide" after Ukrainian officials said Russian planes bombed a children's hospital on Wednesday, burying patients in the rubble despite a ceasefire agreement for people fleeing Mariupol.

"What kind of country is the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, is afraid of maternity hospitals and destroys them?", President Zelenskiy criticized in a televised address on Wednesday evening, citing Reuters on March 10.

The attack, which authorities say injured women in labor and left children in rubble, underscores the US warning. The biggest offensive on a European country since 1945 could become less and less after Russia's initial fiasco.

Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted video footage of what it said was a hospital, showing a hole where a window should have been in a three-story building. Huge piles of smoldering debris littered the scene.

The governor of the Donetsk region said 17 people were injured in the attack. The UN's human rights agency said it was trying to verify the toll in Mariupol. The incident "adds to our deep concern about the indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas", he added through a spokesman.

Separately, the White House condemned the hospital bombing as a "barbaric use of military force to pursue innocent civilians".

"That's how fake news was born", Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia's first permanent representative to the United Nations, said on Twitter.

Polyanskiy said Russia had warned on March 7 that the hospital had been turned into a military object from which Ukrainians were shooting.

Russia had previously vowed to stop shooting so that at least some of the trapped civilians could escape from Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of people have taken shelter without water or electricity for more than a week. Both sides blamed each other for the failure of the evacuation.

To note, Turkey's Foreign Minister and Russian Foreign Minister are set to meet in Turkey this Thursday, in the first high-level talks between the two countries since Moscow's invasion, with Ankara hoping they could mark a turning point in the raging conflict.