It was Monday lunchtime and Eka Grbich was waiting to see her doctor at a private maternity clinic in Kyiv. The news that morning was terrible. Ukraine was under a massive Russian attack. One cruise missile hit the capital’s main Okhmatdyt children’s hospital. Another destroyed a block of flats, killing and entombing many of those inside.
Grbich posted distressing images from the hospital on her Instagram account. She made a couple of work calls. And then, suddenly, her own world went dark. “There was a very loud noise. It happened in one second. There was smoke and I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t feel pain. I was thinking: ‘Am I alive?’. Somebody helped me to stand up.”
A Russian missile, seen on dashcam footage, had ploughed through the roof of the Adonis clinic, located on the left bank of Kyiv’s Dnipro River. It threw a plume of black smoke into the sky and a shower of debris. A woman who had been sitting next to Grbich in a corridor reception area lay dead on the floor. Grbich – shoeless and bleeding from her right ear – staggered towards the light.
The clinic’s head gynaecologist, Gali Alya Shabanovich, found Grbich and took her to his wrecked treatment room, covered in glass and broken furniture. He then dashed to help his colleague Viktor Bragutsa, an ultrasound doctor. Shabanovich was unable to resuscitate him.
Grbich recalled: “I was sleepwalking through a horror. I recognised a doctor [Bragutsa] and saw one leg was missing. I started to cry and scream.”
She stumbled downstairs and joined survivors in a basement shelter. Rescuers loaded her into an ambulance together with Svitlana Poplavska, an obstetrician at the clinic, who was wheezing and barely conscious.
“The lady was in a very bad way,” Grbich said. Poplavska died later in hospital. “Everything is still so raw. An angel wrapped its wings around me and protected me,” Grbich reflected.
The missile strikes on Monday were among the most deadly since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale February 2022 invasion and the worst for four months. Forty-four people died, five of them children. Another 196 people were injured. Eleven survivors were dug from rubble.
Missiles were launched at several large Ukrainian cities: Kyiv, Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih – where the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, grew up – as well as the eastern town of Pokrovsk. Russia claimed Ukrainian counterfire caused the casualties. The Ukrainian government, the United Nations and open-source experts all pointed the finger at Moscow.
Video showed a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile was used to target the paediatric hospital, one of the largest in Europe, where children hurt in previous Kremlin attacks were taken for treatment and rehabilitation.
The images – of boys and girls suffering from cancer, still attached to drips and sitting dazed amid debris – shocked and outraged the international community.
US president Joe Biden called it a “horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality”, while the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said “attacking innocent children” was “the most depraved of actions”. One of the sick youngsters evacuated to another medical institution on Monday has since died.
Asked if this latest Putin onslaught was done to send a message to western leaders, who met last week at the Nato summit in Washington, one Zelenskiy aide replied: “Of course.”
Nato countries reaffirmed their support for Kyiv and promised to deliver five new strategic air defence systems over the next year, as well as hundreds of extra interceptors. While welcome, they are insufficient to shoot down every enemy rocket, Ukrainian officials say.
Speaking on Friday, after a press conference in which he confused Zelenskiy with Putin, Biden said it was Ukraine, not Russia that would “prevail” in Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
But the White House has so far refused to allow Ukraine’s armed forces to use US-supplied weapons against airfields and military targets deep inside Russia. For now, Russian warplanes are free to pulverise Ukrainian troops on the frontline as well as civilian buildings and homes in densely populated cities.
“For terrorists, there is nothing holy. They don’t care. They will destroy everything: kids, infrastructure, medics, our very future,” said Shabanovich, the Adonis doctor. He described his murdered co-worker Poplavska as kind and clever. “Our colleagues were the best. Death doesn’t choose. It just happens,” he said.
Five people from the Adonis clinic perished. They included two nurses – Tetiana Sharova and Oksana Korzh – and bookkeeper Victoria Bondarenko. Another doctor, Svitlana Lukyanchyk, was killed at the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital.
Putin’s apparent goal is to convince Ukrainians that their only sensible option – after nearly two and half years of bloody all-out war – is to capitulate. There is little evidence this strategy is working. Last week, hundreds of volunteers joined clean-up and rescue operations.
They picked up glass, removed fallen branches and carried away rubble in long human chains. Others brought food and bottles of water as the capital sweltered in 33C (91F) sunshine.
“I think we’ve gone a little crazy. There’s so much pain. But there’s also a lot of love. You can see it and feel it. There’s solidarity among Kyiv people in the face of tragedy,” said volunteer Mariia Hlazunova. Armed with a shovel and a pair of gloves, she spent two days working in the Syrets district, where a Russian missile struck a block of flats. Thirteen people died there, among them a mother and her two children aged 10 and eight.
Those helping included two boys who arrived at the scene on bikes and a young woman with a six-month-old baby. One resident came home after the attack to find their cat hiding in a cupboard and a large rocket fragment embedded in the kitchen, Hlazunova said.
“You see a completely fucked-up disaster in your city. And yet if you do something together with others, you feel less powerless and a little bit better,” she explained.
Grbich, meanwhile, suffered cuts and concussion. Doctors cleaned up her bloodied legs and gave her a tetanus injection. A 33-year-old fashion stylist who lives in London’s Clerkenwell, Grbich had returned from the UK to her native Ukraine to visit her terminally ill mother.
In hospital, she borrowed a phone – hers was lost – and called her British husband, Robin, a film distributor. The couple are trying for a baby and he had dropped her at the Adonis clinic for a post-surgery check-up.
“We were pretty convinced air defences in Kyiv were good and missiles would be shot out of the sky,” Robin said. “I thought the danger came from falling shrapnel. When I learned what had happened to Eka, I was completely frozen. Sadness pours out of you.” They plan to go back to London next month, where Grbich promotes Ukrainian fashion brands to British customers.
Grbich said she did not want to give in to hate. “Moscow cannot bomb my decision. I chose love,” she posted on Instagram. She said she thinks about Poplavska, the dying woman who lay next to her in an ambulance: “A mother of three. A builder. A creator. A giver. She brought three children into the world and countless more with her patients. And now she is gone.”
