Pregnant woman pictured on stretcher dies with her baby after Ukraine hospital bombing by Russia

A pregnant woman whose image went viral after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked a Ukrainian hospital has died along with her baby, medics say.

On 9 March 2022, the Russian Air Force bombed Maternity Hospital No 3, a hospital complex functioning both as a children’s hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol, Ukraine, killing at least three people and injuring at least seventeen.

Pictures of the unnamed mother-to-be in agony as she was carried from the Mariupol hospital stunned the world last week after an attack on . The woman was rushed to another hospital, closer to the frontline, where doctors worked to keep her alive.

But realising she was losing her baby, medics said that she cried out to them: ‘Kill me now.’

This morning the doctors trying to save them both spoke of the huge efforts trying to save them.

Surgeon Timur Marin found the woman’s pelvis crushed and hip detached. Medics delivered the baby via caesarean section, but it showed ‘no signs of life’, the surgeon said. They then began work on the mother.

‘More than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother didn’t produce results,’ Mr Marin said on Saturday. ‘Both died.’

After Wednesday’s airstrike, medics did not have time to get the woman’s name before her husband and father came to take away her body.

Someone came to retrieve her, they said so she that she doesn’t end up in the mass graves being dug for the victims of Vladimir Putin’s forces.