(Kyiv) A building of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was the target of Russian bombardments in Mariupol, a strategic port besieged in the south-east of Ukraine, a Ukrainian official said on Wednesday.
Posted at 9:20 a.m.
“The occupants deliberately bombed an ICRC building in Mariupol,” Lyudmyla Denisova, human rights officer at the Ukrainian parliament, wrote on Telegram.
“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 aerial image of a building with a roof marked with a red cross.
“For the moment, we have no information concerning the victims,” she said, without specifying how many people may have been in the building at the time of the shooting.
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.
The information put forward by Kyiv 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 city.
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 .
As part of 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.