At one of many hospitals, Tertel mentioned, Ukrainian navy personnel have been being handled, hiding “behind the backs of sick kids.”
“All these individuals and their plans are identified to us,” Tertel mentioned. “Within the struggle in opposition to terrorism, we act in keeping with the legal guidelines of wartime — decisively and with out hesitation.”
Kyiv authorities seen Tertel’s assertion — which was posted as a video on the web — as a attainable warning of a missile or drone assault.
“The enemy really introduced an assault on these medical establishments, naming even the addresses,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko mentioned, talking in a video he posted on social media that was self-recorded from the grounds in entrance of the kids’s hospital.
“Allegedly there are navy personnel in these establishments,” Klitschko mentioned, rebutting it as a false declare directed by Russia “to assault the capital’s social infrastructure.”
Belarus is allied with Russia and allowed Moscow’s forces to make use of its territory to invade Ukraine from the north in February 2022. Since then, nevertheless, Lukashenko has resisted stress to contain Belarusian forces immediately in Russia’s warfare.
Klitschko mentioned that officers “needed to do all the things to maneuver the sufferers and medical personnel to different medical establishments in our metropolis.”
“This can be a difficult and never a straightforward course of,” Klitschko mentioned. “However we can not danger the lives of individuals.”
A Washington Submit group arrived on the kids’s hospital because the final dad and mom have been leaving with their kids and the emergency ward had been absolutely evacuated. There was no signal of any navy personnel being handled on the premises.
Ihor Zorkov led his daughter Viktoriya, 2, by the hand as they walked down the hallway to the hospital exit, and he juggled three small plastic baggage together with her belongings. Viktoriya had been within the hospital for the previous 5 days with a viral an infection and a temperature, he mentioned.
“They are saying we are able to come again Monday,” Zorkov mentioned, as Viktoriya began to cry. “There’s a danger of an assault.”
Yevhenia Hryhoryeva, the pinnacle physician on the kids’s hospital, mentioned that the evacuation started a half-hour after metropolis officers contacted her and was accomplished inside 90 minutes. She declined to say what number of kids have been evacuated.
The hospital was not harboring Ukrainian navy, Hryhoryeva mentioned, although she mentioned she was not stunned by the accusation. There’s “a variety of disinformation daily” from Russia and its allies, she mentioned.
“We’re all used to it, so we don’t take note of it in any respect,” she mentioned. “We solely take into consideration what actions there ought to be to shortly evacuate the kids.”
Ukraine’s safety service, the SBU, mentioned in a press release that reviews of “legendary terrorists who’re allegedly in Ukrainian hospitals” have been a type of “informational and psychological particular operations that play into the arms of the Russian Federation.”
“The representatives of the Belarusian regime, which has utterly surrendered its nation to Russia, ought to perceive a easy factor — the individuals who shield Ukraine from the invaders are heroes, not terrorists,” the SBU mentioned. “As a result of the actual terrorists are within the Kremlin.”
The assertion added: “The Belarusian authorities shouldn’t scare Ukrainians with false statements however take into consideration how to not find yourself on the dock in The Hague subsequent to the Kremlin dictator.”
