Volunteers found a destroyed nursing home with patients in Mariupol

City residents in the Left Bank district of Mariupol. File photoMOSCOW, April 15When distributing humanitarian aid from Russian confessions in Mariupol, volunteers of the «Combat Brotherhood» discovered an abandoned nursing home, where there were more than 70 elderly people, said Hieromonk Stefan (Igumnov), Secretary of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate for Inter-Christian Relations. Previously, the Interreligious Working Group for the protection of the rights of believers from discrimination and xenophobia collected more than 15 tons of assistance for Mariupol residents.The Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol was freed from the national battalions»When we were already planning the distribution of cargo, just yesterday a message came from the people who organize the distribution of cargo on the spot, from the Combat Brotherhood organization, that they had actually discovered an abandoned nursing home, where more 70 old people, most of them bedridden. I got a call yesterday, and I also conferred with my colleagues, asking: is it possible to give part of our cargo to these old people?» — Igumnov, who heads the group, said at a conference at the Rossiya Segodnya MIA. One of the buildings of the house, he noted, was almost completely destroyed by the forces «with which our soldiers are fighting — it was the opposite side that fired at it.» Some of the old people, according to the hieromonk, were transferred to other buildings, but the windows and doors were also broken there. «The elderly from this nursing home will be placed in hospitals and other facilities where they can be cared for,» he said.Bastrykin instructed to investigate the capture by the nationalists of a nursing home in the LPR «There was practically no staff left, only one mistress remained, people were mostly bedridden, and the diapers that we collected for the elderly came in handy, we knew that there was such a need, and those hygiene products that we thought that children needed — baby creams, powders. Part of this cargo we gave with great desire to these old people, and part of the products. <…> This nanny thanked our soldiers for the protection under which they took this object,» Hieromonk Stefan added. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops and, as of March 25, they have completed the main tasks of the first stage — they have significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.