CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was careful with her words when asked if Russian President Vladimir Putin was guilty of war crimes after officials said an airstrike hit a children’s hospital and maternity facility in the besieged port city of Mariupol on Wednesday.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Ambassador Kristina Kvien said on the Wednesday night edition of “The Donlon Report.” “But let’s just say that targeting civilians is a war crime. As you see the hospital today, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. But certainly, it seems to me that civilians are being hit.”
Kvien is speaking of the footage that surfaced Wednesday morning showing a decimated children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol.
Ukrainian officials say at least 17 people were wounded.
Putin’s camp denies the reports. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters, “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.” But several world leaders have since spoken up condemning the act.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter that there were “people, children under the wreckage” and called the strike an “atrocity.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, “There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenseless,” adding that Putin will be held “to account for his terrible crimes.”
And Volodymir Nikulin, a top regional police official, called the act a “a war crime without any justification.”
“President Putin is a pariah right now on the world stage,” Kvien said. She says he belongs in the came conversation as the leaders of North Korea and Syria because he’s “committing actions that, frankly, no country should be allowed to to commit.”
The condemnation was amplified because the attack came amid new cease-fire agreements that took effect that same morning. The pact was made so thousands of civilians could escape Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha. It also provided escape routes for people in the bombarded towns around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Additionally, Kvien accuses the Russian military of deploying a thermobaric weapon, also known as a “vacuum bomb,” in Ukraine, which is prohibited by Geneva Conventions. When used in populated areas, those types of weapons typically lead to mass casualties among civilians.
“Unfortunately, this is what we’ve seen from Russia since the conflict began,” Kvien said, “going after civilians and indiscriminately hitting targets with no concern for civilian life or children or any resident of Ukraine.”
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine. While President Joe Biden and other Western nations have chosen to err on the side of caution when it comes to intervening, Kvien says there’s more that can be done.
“Every world leader needs to come out against what President Putin is doing. The question is now, will President Putin step back? Or will he make his country a global pariah for decades to come?”