Russian air strikes on Ukrainian hospitals have injured dozens of people and forced hundreds of patients to be evacuated this week, deepening fears of a winter crisis amid intensifying attacks on civilian infrastructure that have been condemned as war crimes.
Seventy-three people, including patients, medical staff and residents of nearby apartments, were hurt when a Russian bomb hit a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the early hours of Tuesday. Officials also said that 226 patients were moved to other facilities, and that the blast blew out more than 1,000 windows in the hospital and surrounding buildings.
A few hours later and 250km to the southwest, a Russian missile hit a combined hospital and hospice in Dnipro, prompting more than 100 patients to be moved to other medical facilities in the city.
Nearly half of those evacuated were terminally ill people receiving hospice care, the oldest of whom is 90 years old, local officials said.
No one was killed at the Dnipro hospital, but two people died and 20 were wounded in the same wave of Russian strikes on the city.
An underground school lies destroyed after a Russian air strike in Komyshuvakha, Ukraine. Photograph: AP
A day earlier, Russian warplanes dropped several bombs on a school in the village of Komyshuvakha, 120km south of Dnipro, where humanitarian aid was being handed out to local residents. Officials said on Wednesday that the death toll from the strike had risen to 37, and that more than 30 people were still missing.
“There are injuries – wounds caused by debris . . . and glass, as well as acute stress reactions,” Viktor Zabashta, director of Kharkiv’s regional centre for emergency medical care, said of the strike on the city.
“Naturally, these people were terrified. They are unwell and mostly very elderly, and had to be moved down to a bomb shelter and then sat in the cold in the admissions area,” he told local media.
Dnipro mayor Borys Filatov said the hospital in his city had only recently been renovated, and that the hospice was “one of the few places where such assistance and care is provided to Dnipro residents and displaced people living here . . . Now all of this has been destroyed by a Russian missile.”
The World Health Organisation says more than 3,400 attacks on Ukrainian healthcare have taken place since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, 590 of which happened this year, killing 31 people and injuring more than 250.
“These attacks by Russian forces on the basic essentials of civilian life just keep coming,” says Robin Meldrum, country director in Ukraine for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which helped evacuate patients in Dnipro.
this attack seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law
— Danielle Bell, head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine
“Whether targeted or indiscriminate, they surely amount to serious violations of international humanitarian law. For people who are already living under daily threats from missiles and drones, attacks on hospitals should be unthinkable, but here in Ukraine they are an ever-present risk.”
The bombing of Komyshuvakha was one of Russia’s deadliest attacks of the war.
“Either the Russian armed forces knew that there was a humanitarian distribution taking place, or they failed to take the most basic steps to find out what was happening in this village they were planning to attack,” said Danielle Bell, head of the United Nations human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine.
“In either case, this attack seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”
Russia is launching daily strikes on Ukraine’s power grid and other infrastructure, causing long blackouts and disrupting heating and water supply in some cities.
Late last month, the UN’s independent international commission of inquiry on Ukraine found that Russia had “committed war crimes of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects”.
Russia claims to be striking only targets that are used by the Ukrainian military.
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