Sajid Javid has expressed his fury over Russia’s bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol as it emerged that a mother and her newborn baby have died in the aftermath.
Pictures of the heavily pregnant woman being carried away from the wreckage on a stretcher went viral last week.
On BBC Breakfast on Monday, Javid gave his reaction to the devastating news that the pair had subsequently died.
The health secretary said: “I just saw that image a moment ago and my reaction? It fills me with rage to see something like that.
“These are appalling atrocities being committed on innocent Ukrainians by Russians, this was an attack on a hospital, a health facility, we know already from the WHO that we know already of 31 such attacks throughout Ukraine on health facilities.
“These are war crimes and [Russian president Vladimir] Putin will be held responsible.”
The health secretary also revealed that the justice secretary Dominic Raab would be going to the Hague to speak to prosecutors preparing a war crimes case against Putin.
“He will ultimately be held responsible for sure,” he promised.
The cabinet minister said that “when that prosecution comes” the UK would be helping the court get what it needs.
In the hours after the attack on the hospital, at least 17 people were reported injured and three dead.
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that the shelling meant people and children were trapped “under the wreckage”, and called the attack “an atrocity”.
Prime minister Boris Johnson tweeted: “There are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless.”
Russia has falsely denied that any civilians had been targeted in the attack, with the country’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claiming that any patients had been evacuated from the hospital days before.
He also alleged that the building had become a base for the Azov battalion, a group of neo-Nazis, by the time Russian shelling had began.
He even alleged that Russia had told the UN Security Council three days before the attack that the hospital had been taken over by the Azov battalion, despite the widespread footage showing the damage caused by the attack.