Daryna Vertetska was sitting with her 8-year-old daughter in Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital when Russian missiles started ringing in the sky on Monday morning.
Her daughter Kira was undergoing cancer treatment when an explosion occurred in the capital, Kiev.
“We decided not to interrupt it,” Ms. Wittzka said of the treatment.
Kira said that as she continued to receive treatment, a missile directly hit the Ohmatit Children’s Hospital, causing an unspeakable explosion. The flying shards of glass cut the child’s skin.
“She was very scared,” said Ms. Wittzka, 33.
Now the hospital where Kira received life-saving treatment for five months has disappeared, another medical facility destroyed by Russia during its years-long invasion of Ukraine.
As exhausted rescuers finished combing through the hospital’s rubble on Tuesday, doctors and nurses raced to help dozens of critically ill children who must now seek care elsewhere, including many like Kira who are undergoing intensive cancer treatments .
No children died at the hospital on Monday, but its destruction marked one of the worst days of violence against Ukrainian civilians in months, with more than 30 people killed in Kiev alone. Russia’s attacks on Monday targeted the capital and cities across the country.
“I don’t want to, but I think I’m losing hope,” Ms. Wittzka said.
The hospital attack left young patients sitting in the street with IVs on their arms. The explosion also damaged Ukraine’s state-of-the-art laboratory used to test and confirm certain types of cancer, Ukraine’s health ministry said, adding that it was assessing the condition of the equipment to see what could be restored.
“It’s scary because this is the only reference laboratory in Ukraine that can confirm all oncohematological diseases,” Dr. Natalia Molodets, director of the Department of Pediatric Hematology at the Odessa Regional Children’s Hospital, said of blood cancers.
Dr. Molodetz said the laboratory continued to operate even in the early weeks of the war, when Russian forces tried to capture Kiev.
“This is vital for our children,” she said.
Russia has targeted medical facilities in Ukraine since day one of the war, a pattern outlined by a range of international human rights groups. A bombing at a maternity hospital in Mariupol, just weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was an early sign of Moscow’s ruthless tactics.
As of April this year, the World Health Organization stated that it had verified approximately 1,682 incidents of direct attacks on medical facilities using heavy weapons, resulting in 128 deaths and 288 injuries to staff and patients.
On Monday, at the same time that the Children’s Hospital was attacked, fragments from another Russian missile crashed into the Isida Maternity Hospital and a private clinic elsewhere in Kiev. That strike killed nine people, including two children.
Two other children – 10-year-old Maksym Symaniuk and his 9-year-old sister Nastia – were also dropped at the home on Monday, according to the Ukrainian Karate Federation. Killed by missile fragments.
Volodymyr Zhovnir, director of the Ohmatit Children’s Hospital, gave testimony about the strike at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday.
“Children and adults were screaming and crying out of fear, and the injured were screaming out of pain,” he said. “It was a hell.” Zovnir said more than 300 people were injured, including eight children. Two adults were also killed, including a doctor.
At the Security Council meeting, Moscow denied attacking the facility, although video footage and missile fragmentation analysis collected by Ukrainian security services suggested the hospital was hit by a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile.
International organizations including UNICEF and the Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk Foundation have pledged to help rebuild the hospital. But Okhmatdyt performs about 7,000 complex surgeries a year, and doctors say it won’t be easily replaced.
President Joe Biden, who welcomed Western leaders to Washington on Tuesday to celebrate the 75th anniversary of NATO, issued a statement calling Monday’s attack “a horrific reminder of Russia’s atrocities.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday called the attack on the children’s hospital “particularly despicable,” adding that it would only redouble Western military support for Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters in Washington alongside visiting Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, Blinken noted that he had personally visited the hospital during multiple visits to Ukraine and met with sick and injured children there.
During regular air raids, children being treated at Okhmatdyt often cannot be evacuated to the hospital’s air raid shelters because moving them would interrupt their care. Many patients are now being transferred to other hospitals across Ukraine, including Odessa and Lviv.
As the nation’s top children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt is also where children who have suffered severe physical and mental trauma are sent for treatment. Staff are trained to handle some of the most difficult medical conditions. But many said they were unprepared for Monday’s terror attacks.
Nazar Borozniuk, a physiotherapist at the hospital, said it was pure luck that no children died.
A video he took inside the hospital after the attack showed ceiling tiles and broken glass on the floor. “This is how everything looks now,” he says in the video. “I hope nothing happens to us.”
Borozniuk described the harrowing scene unfolding in front of patients and staff at the hospital in a phone call Monday evening. “We started evacuating children, parents and families,” he said.
Hospital staff along with emergency medical personnel and volunteers worked Monday to care for the injured. While firefighters sprinkled water on the rubble to prevent the fire from spreading, other parts of the hospital, such as the emergency room, continued to operate.
“I couldn’t even pick up the phone because my hands were covered in blood from helping,” Mr. Borozniuk said. “I just knew what needed to be done with the children: provide first aid, help the injured and evacuate those in need,” he added.
The scene was so chaotic that Borozniuk said his feelings “just disappeared.” But as he drove home Monday night, hours after the attack on the hospital, he finally began to think about what had happened. “It’s definitely going to have a psychological impact on everyone,” he said.
“We are all human beings.”
Alexandra Mykolysin Contributing reporting from Kyiv, Zvenka Pinchuk Departing from Odessa, Eve Sampson from New York and Michael Crowley From Washington.
