Russian FM scoffs at casualty reports from Ukraine: ‘Pathetic shrieks’

Russia’s foreign minister is dismissing concerns about Russian military attacks on civilians, including on a maternity hospital, as “pathetic shrieks” from its enemies.

Sergey Lavrov speaks after meeting his Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey in the highest-level Russian-Ukrainian talks since the war began last month.

In the Russian government’s first public comment on Wednesday’s strike on a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol, Lavrov doesn’t deny or shy away from responsibility for the attack.

He claims the site had earlier been seized by Ukrainian far-right radical fighters who were using it as a base. Even though there were many images of civilians wounded in the attack and the city council said a child was among the three people killed, Lavrov claims all the patients and nurses were moved out of the hospital before the assault.

“It is not the first time we see pathetic shrieks concerning so-called atrocities,” he says.

It is believed that thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in he war so far.