On April 19th, a video of an explosion was published by the Facebook page of “TV Pirveli,” allegedly showing the bombing of Mariupol Hospital on April 19th and “the explosion being so strong that the sound could be heard within a radius of 100 km.” The post also states that there were 300 people in the hospital at the time of the blast – women, children and the wounded.
The video disseminated by TV Pirveli, in fact, depicts not the April 19th bombing of a Mariupol city hospital but the 2017 explosion at a military ammunition depot near the Ukrainian city of Balaklia.
The video depicts an explosion at a military depot near the town of Balaklia in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine in 2017. The video posted by TV Pirveli is from the 3:24 minute-long video of the YouTube channel “Arcorize.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also wrote about the fire in Balaklia back in 2017. According to the Alliance’s website, fires first broke out in the building, causing the detonation of missiles and ammunition.
As for the bombing of the Mariupol hospital, according to Ukrainian MP Sergiy Taruta, on April 19th, Russian military forces have in fact bombed a hospital near the Azovstal factory in Mariupol.
According to Taruta, as a result of the bombing of the hospital, about 300 people were left under the rubble. The information disseminated by Taruta was confirmed by the Azov Battalion to the Ukrainian media outlet Kanal 24. According to the Battalion, the Azovstal factory was also bombed by Russia, which was sheltering peaceful civilians.
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