Russian forces continued their siege of the embattled city of Mariupol on Thursday, the day after a maternity hospital bombing that a Ukrainian official said killed three people, including a six-year-old child.

It was the eighth day that Russian forces have bombarded the city of 430,000, a key strategic target for them on the Sea of Azov that has quickly become the site one of the most severe humanitarian crises of the war. Most communications are cut off, people are struggling to find food and water and the authorities have been burying the dead in mass graves.

“Bombs are falling in Mariupol all the time,” said Halyna Odnoroh, an activist who managed to leave the city but whose daughter remains inside it. “Buildings are falling to the ground as if they were made of matchsticks. We need help!”

She added, “Soon Mariupol will be one big mass grave with half a million bodies!”

Satellite imagery from the city has shown significant damage to some buildings, with shopping centres and homes destroyed. The bombing of the maternity hospital on Wednesday left three people dead, the city’s deputy mayor said on Thursday, and 17 others had been injured, including women who had been in labour.

The Kremlin denied the extent of the casualties and appeared to try to legitimise the targeting of the hospital.

“It is not the first time we see pathetic outcries concerning the so-called atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military,” foreign minister Sergei V. Lavrov said on Thursday, after inconclusive talks with his Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey.

He said that several days ago the Russian delegation to the UN offered evidence that the maternity hospital had been taken over by a group of Ukrainian fighters known as the Azov battalion, “and other radicals”, and that “all the mothers about to give birth and nurses had been chased out” of the building. The Kremlin has claimed that its invasion means to achieve the “denazification” and demilitarisation of Ukraine.

Photographs and videos taken after the bomb went off and testimony from eyewitnesses showed heavily pregnant women being evacuated, including one on a stretcher.

Footage from inside and outside the hospital shows windows completely blown out and cars burned beyond recognition. The Russian embassy in London tried to dismiss the photos as fake.

“Children’s hospital. Maternity hospital. What did they threaten the Russian Federation with?” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine asked in an address late Wednesday night. “What kind of country is this — the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals and maternity hospitals and destroys them?”

For days, the city has tried to organise the evacuation of women and children, but gathering places for evacuees have come under Russian fire.

“It’s very hard now and it’s simply unrealistic to leave,” said Anastasia Pikuz, who was able to get out several days ago but left behind her mother and disabled grandmother. She has not been able to reach them since she left on Saturday, but she has been in daily touch with her husband.

(New York Times News Service)