RUSSIA continued to bomb Mariupol today a day after being accused of war crimes for bombing a children’s hospital.

A child was reported to be among the dead and a further 17 people were injured after the health facility was struck several times during the attack.

Kiev said the air strikes were “a war crime without justification,” adding that children were trapped under the rubble.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky accused Russia of carrying out a genocide in his nightly address after hearing of the bombing.

“A children's hospital. A maternity hospital. How did they threaten the Russian Federation?” he said.

“What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres described the attack as horrific, with civilians “paying the highest price for a war that has nothing to do with them.”

The Kremlin denied the accusation, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova describing the claims as “information terrorism.”

Earlier, Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy said reports of the hospital attack were “fake news.”

Russian diplomats told the UN security council on Monday that the hospital had been evacuated and was being used as a base for the neonazi Azov Battalion, which is based in Mariupol.

The Lenta news outlet claimed on March 8 to have spoken to the son of a worker at the hospital, who told them that “in the last days of February men in uniforms entered the maternity hospital …[and] told everyone to get out and established firing points in the building.”

Bombs continued to fall on the city today as a humanitarian convoy was forced to turn back before it could reach the besieged residents.

Hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped without food and water in the port city beside the Black Sea.

Several previous attempts to establish a humanitarian corridor from Mariupol have failed.

Trade unions in Ukraine have appealed for international solidarity, with conditions deteriorating rapidly since Russia’s invasion began last month.

“It’s a very cold winter. Food is running out. This is a great humanitarian tragedy,” one trade union leader said during an online meeting with global trade union federation Industriall, earlier this week.