Why did Russians bomb a children's hospital in Ukraine?

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine, unfolding to the full witness of people armed with smartphones, suggests, paradoxically, the difficulty of getting at the truth in the brave new cyber age.

This difficulty should be attributed to the ease an image might be edited and exploited by unscrupulous users to serve an agenda.

The trade of accusations of "genocide" and "fake news" over Russian bombing of a hospital in Ukraine on Wednesday is a case in point.

In the wake of the bombing of a hospital in Mariupol, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russians of "genocide."

"What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, is afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?" Zelensky asked in a televised address late on Wednesday. Local officials said on Thursday at least 3 people were killed in the attack.

Russia's foreign ministry accused Ukrainian nationalist battalions of using the hospital to set up firing positions after moving out staff and patients. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday the hospital was a military base for members of the radical Azov Battalion.

A Russian website specializing in exposing falsehoods and disinformation said earlier the hospital had ceased its normal operations before the Russian special operation started late last month. Obviously, the suspension of power and water supplies as a result of the long siege by Russian troops had made the structure uninhabitable for all but the militants.

When an influential Western news agency reported this sensational news, it circumvented the complications of having to check with credible sources, choosing instead to work itself up into a pitch of indignation by simply repeating the claim of "genocide."

Only incidentally it mentioned the allegation of a United Nations Human Rights body to the effect that "it was verifying the number of casualties at Mariupol."

It will not be easy in this post-truth age.

The loss of life is deeply tragic, though equally tragic is the exploitation of tragic images, when they got edited -- not by professional newsmen -- but by influencers who care more about the effect than anything else.

Look on the amount of misleading images that have gone viral on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and despair.

It comes as no surprise that the commodity most in short supply in Ukraine today is not anti-tank missiles or military aircraft but truth, the whole truth.