‘We have not even attacked Ukraine ’ - Sergei Lavrov.

An injured pregnant woman leaving a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.

 Sergei Lavrov claimed all pregnant women had been evacuated prior to shelling. 

Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

He later justified the attack on Mariupol’s maternity hospital by saying Russia had warned at the UN days earlier that the hospital had been taken over by Azov battalion, a right-wing, neo-Nazi militia battalion initially formed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. “All the mothers that were about to give birth were chased out of there,” he claimed. “It is not the first time we see pathetic outcries concerning so-called atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military. Unfortunately the other side is never looked at.” Read more