2024-07-11 20:57:12
On Monday, Kiev faced one of the worst attacks since the start of the war. The Russians also attacked a children’s hospital, which resulted in three victims, including one child. Doctors and nurses protected patients with their own bodies. The newspaper Aktuálně.cz brings a comprehensive report by Ukrainian journalists about the attack on the largest children’s hospital in the country. Russia also shelled the cities of Dnieper, Kryvyi Rih, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk that day.
The alarm in Ukraine went off on Monday at the beginning of the working day at 10:30. According to the Ukrainian military, the air force shot down most of the 38 enemy missiles. But in the capital, residential buildings, the administrative building of one of the factories and the Ochmatdyt Children’s Hospital were hit by the missiles.
The medical facility treats approximately 600 patients with various diseases every day. It specializes in the treatment of oncological, genetic and neurological diseases and saves children with complications of infectious diseases. It also has a center for the treatment of rare diseases and provides bone marrow transplantation.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022, children with severe injuries and amputations from all over the country have been treated in Ochmatdyt. When the life of a child and a parent turns into a constant struggle for every breath, Ukrainians turn to Ochmatdyt as a symbol of the last hope of salvation. The hospital has ten buildings with the most modern equipment in Ukraine. Surgeons very often operate on patients amid the sounds of air raids and shelling, because they cannot postpone procedures. On Monday, June 8, a Russian rocket hit one of the hospital buildings during operations.
Nurse Iryna was currently preparing an eight-month-old baby for heart surgery. A doctor rushed to the child during the explosion and covered him from the fragments of glass and concrete. In the neighboring halls, operations were already taking place and child patients were lying on tables with their chests open. Even the doctors protected themselves with their bodies. Medical staff in the intensive care unit transferred the children on hospital beds to the corridor, where they were saved by shelter behind two walls.
Inna Bondarenková, a senior nurse from the ICU, describes that it is not possible to transfer the patients to the underground shelter, because they breathe with the help of oxygen devices and cannot walk. The children are in such a serious condition that their parents accompany them during treatment.
Kyiv continues to clear the rubble of a children’s hospital hit by Russian shelling. | Video: Latin America News Agency
When everyone hid in the corridor, Inna Bondarenko ran to her office. She forgot something, but in shock she couldn’t remember what. The moment she entered the room, there was an explosion. The shock wave threw the nurse against the wall and the falling glass cut her arms and face. Inna reached the door on her knees, started to get up, and her head was spinning. She had the feeling that the explosion had ripped the building and all the people inside it from the ground. Inna cries while telling the story. Head nurse from ICU Anna Isajevová hugs her.
Isaevova remembers that the explosion immediately broke all the windows in the building, the doors flew open and the ceiling structure began to fall. The extremely strong impact threw heavy equipment from the ward into the corridors.
In the first moments, children and adults were paralyzed with terror. “The adults pressed their crying children together with all their might. When the initial shock wore off, people started running outside. No one understood where the rocket exploded,” recalls Bondarenko.
Broken glass crackled underfoot. Medicine boxes and children’s drawings were lying everywhere. Video taken by doctors in the first minutes after the explosion shows the hospital courtyard covered in smoke and dust. Small pieces of colored film that was used to cover the windows of one of the hospital buildings float in the air. As the windows shattered, small pieces of torn film fell into the yard like a blanket of snow.
Doctors and nurses were the first to clear away the rubble. Many of them were wearing medical clothes covered in blood. Their hands were cut.
The debris made access to the damaged parts of the hospital impossible. Smoke stung his eyes. Soon a human chain had formed and the survivors were passing pieces of broken bricks and concrete. Hot stones burned their hands. No one knew if there were doctors and children under the rubble.
One of the doctors posted a plea on social media saying: “I’m alive, I need help clearing the debris.” Residents of neighboring buildings responded to the post, running to help with bottles of water. Some began to clear away the rubble, others entered the destroyed hospital rooms and carried children in their arms.
Buildings on fire, parcels of water
Ambulances started arriving from all over Kyiv. The sound of sirens did not stop. Small patients wrapped in sheets and with oxygen generators were taken to ambulances. In the shadow of one of the damaged buildings, children sat in a row without hair, which they looked like as a result of chemotherapy. The bare heads of oncology patients stood out in the crowd. They were in wheelchairs leaning on adults who hugged them with one hand and held a dropper in the other. Children who could walk were helped by their parents to the ambulances.
Hundreds of people gradually filled the hospital yard, rescuers, police, army and civilians from Kyiv came to help. Everyone was holding bottles of water. It was hot in Kiev and people were thirsty surrounded by smoke, dust and burning buildings.
Rescuers and volunteers help at the scene of the tragedy at the children’s hospital in Kyiv, which was hit by the Russians. | Photo: Reuters
Rescuers flooded the building with fire extinguisher balls, but the fire did not stop. About three hours after the attack, the alarm sounded again. Some went into shelter, but the work continued. People were cleaning up the destroyed buildings. There were at least 200 volunteers on each floor. They scraped the glass with shovels and brooms and cut open the blocked doors with a sander. Hundreds of garbage bags were handed to each other from the sixth floor to the street. Volunteers were protected from dust by masks and respirators distributed by nurses. The overcrowded environment made many people sick, and the nurses took them out for fresh air. Doctors were carrying medical equipment from the rubble to safety.
The intensive care unit was cleared after approximately five hours. In one of the slightly damaged rooms, a nurse connected a sick child to an IV. The girl and her mother were waiting to be transferred to another hospital, the patient could not interrupt the treatment.
After cleaning one building, the volunteers moved on to the next. The explosion damaged five of them, completely destroying one.
People who helped with the consequences of the attack on the hospital in Kyiv brought supplies of bottled water to the site due to the heat. | Photo: Oleksandr Surovtsov
Garbage bags filled the yard. The men tried to clear the space and threw sacks into the trucks.
The number of people who wanted to help was so great that the police had to close the entrance to the hospital. Traffic in the nearby area has come to a standstill. People brought water, food and medicine in large quantities. Rumors spread through the city about children and doctors trapped under the rubble. Smoke was still rising from the destroyed building six hours after the explosion. Because of the large concrete slab, people could not dismantle the rubble. A construction crane was brought to the hospital to remove the slab.
Another attack in Kiev
At around nine in the evening, after the rescue operations had already lasted for over ten hours, the Ukrainian Minister of Health, Viktor Lyashko, spoke about the attack in front of the entrance to the hospital. According to his information on Monday, 50 people were injured and two adults died. Pediatric nephrologist Svetlana Lukyančuková died. In the destroyed building, she treated children who needed dialysis. On the day of the attack, she started work after a holiday. The second victim is a relative of the patient. On Wednesday, Ljaško informed that the shelling of the hospital also had its first child victim – an injured boy.
The authorities evacuated 670 children to other hospitals in the capital – Ochmatdyt cannot function after the attack and the Ukrainian government is looking for premises where doctors could continue to treat children. Some equipment cannot be transported and other facilities in the country do not have it available. Doctors are now evaluating which damaged equipment can be repaired. The hospital stopped the planned procedures, including dozens of operations, for which the children had been preparing for half a year. Transferring patients to other facilities is difficult.
In parallel with the rescue work in Ochmatdyt, the Russians attacked a private medical facility in another Kyiv district. The enemy missile was neutralized by the air defense, pieces of the missile allegedly fell on the building where two hospitals are located. Nine people, including employees from the offices also located in the mentioned building, died.
“I saw the girl’s body. I think she came to the hospital for an appointment. She was lying and not breathing,” describes Oleksandr Karjakin, who works in the office of the building that was hit by the explosion. He survived, but two of his colleagues perished.
Examples from the past
The Reckoning Project has been documenting attacks on medical facilities in Ukraine since the Russians attacked a hospital in Mariupol. At the beginning of March 2022, the city in the south of Ukraine was torn by fighting. On March 9, Russia launched an airstrike on the maternity ward of the Mariupol Children’s Hospital. The attack injured at least 33 people, three people died in the maternity hospital. Among the victims was a pregnant woman and her unborn child.
On the day of the attack, there were 37 pregnant women and 20 children, including premature babies, in the hospital. The staff tried to accommodate as many patients as possible in the corridors. “I thought I was safe when I got to the hospital. No one in their right mind would bomb a maternity hospital. It’s like destroying a church, isn’t it?” one of the survivors, Anastasia Piddubnová, described at the time. Together with her son, who was born two weeks before the raid, she managed to escape from Mariupol.
According to international humanitarian law, hospitals and clinics must not be the target of attacks. They are considered civilian objects with special protection. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that targeted attacks on hospitals and places with the sick and wounded are a war crime.
Russian attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv | Photo: Reuters
International and human rights organizations including eyeWitness to Atrocities, Insecurity Insight, Media Initiative for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights and the Ukrainian Healthcare Center have created a map of attacks on Ukrainian healthcare facilities since the beginning of the invasion. In April 2024, they recorded 1442 attacks on medical facilities, of which 742 cases damaged hospitals and clinics and killed at least 210 workers.
Ukraine is not the first victim of Russian war tactics. In October 1999, Russian rockets hit a maternity hospital in Grozny, Chechnya. According to the AP news agency, at least 30 people died then, including women and newborns. Grozny, like Mariupol, was razed to the ground. In 2016, Russian missiles hit Aleppo, Syria, destroying most of the city’s hospitals and medical facilities.
Russia continues its attacks on power plants, water storage facilities and heating plants in all Ukrainian regions. People can survive without access to electricity, heat and water, but they cannot live in cities without hospitals.
Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital treated the most vulnerable individuals. The attack on the symbol of hope and salvation for many parents across the country was supposed to break the morale of the population.
In Kyiv, more than 2,000 rescuers, police, soldiers and volunteers joined rescue operations after Monday’s Russian strikes. In the first ten hours, 2.5 million dollars (58 million crowns) were collected to help the hospital.
The article was prepared as part of The Reckoning Project initiative of Ukrainian and international reporters, analysts and lawyers, whose goal is to document the war crimes of the Russians in Ukraine. The authors of this project collect the statements of witnesses of possible war crimes and record them in a neutral way according to a methodology that makes them usable for legal cases.
Video: Russian air strike hits a children’s hospital in Kyiv (7/8/2024)
Video: Radio Free Europe