mdd1,
“it implies exactly what i wrote. One is not prohibited from bombing a hospital or a school if there are enemy combatants there unless excessive force is used,”
You’re weaving quite the web of fantasy in order to defend your position. First you posit that Ukrainian soldiers were present near the hospital. That may be so, but there’s no evidence of it. Then you posit that whatever imagined Ukrainian solders that were there had a significance to the Russian war effort that justified shelling a maternity hospital. So maybe Ukrainian soldiers found a nuclear warhead lying around and were preparing to lob it at Moscow from the roof of the hospital, and Russia only had a few artillery pieces within range to prevent the attack. This is quite the leap of faith.
Given that Russia has a supply of precision guided weapons in its arsenal that can be used against the Ukrainian military in urban combat, I think the case that firing artillery shells into heavily populated areas near (or at) highly sensitive civilian locations constitutes a war crime is fairly strong. But the hospital and theater shelling are not even what has generated the recent accusations of war crimes. It’s the evidence of mass killings of civilians in the Kyiv suburbs. What’s your spin on that?