The children sat in stunned silence, their fragile bodies still tethered to medical drips outside the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in central Kyiv, where an impromptu field clinic had sprung up.
They had not long emerged from the hospital’s dark, dusty bomb shelter, and their eyes were still adjusting to the light.
A woman rushed past, cradling an infant covered with blood.
Just an hour earlier, Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest paediatric clinic, renowned for its cancer treatment and a place many of the children had called home for months, had been targeted by a powerful Russian missile attack that killed at least four people and left many injured. At least 32 more died in strikes across countries.
The hospital’s toxicology ward lay in ruins, wrecked by the explosion that sent shrapnel tearing through the main hospital building, shattering its windows. One of the surgical rooms, where doctors had been operating on a child, was reduced to rubble.
Russia’s deadly strike on Monday was not the first of its kind – more than 1,700 medical facilities have been hit since the start of the full-scale invasion, according to the International Rescue Committee.
Still, the sheer brutality of the attack is certain to send shock waves across the west and prompt furious calls in Ukraine for enhanced air defences.
Hundreds of rescuers on Monday afternoon were still combing through the wreckage of the hospital’s toxicology ward, searching for those living or dead still trapped under the rubble, as the first accounts of shock and horror emerged. Outside the hospital entrance, civilians formed a human chain to help clear the rubble brick by brick.
Maria Soloshenko, a 21-year-old nurse who was in the toxicology ward during the strike, described how children – some as young as 18 months old and suffering from kidney problems – had to be hurriedly taken off dialysis and evacuated through the building’s windows.
Soloshenko recounted how she treated another nurse with an open head wound, initially failing to recognise her amid the dust, rubble and blood that covered her face.
The strike appeared to have caused most damage to the top floor of the ward, where she believed a female colleague had probably perished.
Okhmatdyt has long been a critical lifeline for Ukraine’s most severely ill children with complex diseases. Throughout the war, its doctors have faced the challenging task of saving children injured in Russian shelling while also caring for those with pre-existing conditions.
Monday’s daytime strike came when the hospital was at its busiest, said Tanya Lapshina, a nurse at the neighbouring trauma department where the facade was ripped off by the blast. She feared for a child who was undergoing open-heart surgery when the strike hit the building.
Lapshina said her ward managed to bring the children to the shelter just minutes before the strike.
“It was absolute chaos. The children were panicked, crying in the bunker. There are no words for this. It’s awful. I’m still shaking.”
Images from inside the hospital, which treats 20,000 children annually, showed bloodied children, collapsed ceilings and destroyed operating rooms.
The search efforts at the hospital were hampered by several air-raid alarms, compelling emergency staff to seek shelter amid fears of Russia’s infamous double-tap attacks spreading.
“They want to hit us as we save our children. It’s barbaric,” said one volunteer, hiding in the shelter.
Soon after, news came out that a separate maternity unit in Kyiv had been partially destroyed by falling debris, killing four people and wounding three.
“Russia attacks the most vulnerable: children with cancer in Kyiv’s biggest children hospital; maternity house in Kyiv with newborns … It’s a Russian war against life itself,” the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko said in a post on X, summing up the mood in Kyiv.
As rescue efforts continued, the children were evacuated to nearby hospitals, where they would continue their recovery.
They shuffled slowly towards the waiting ambulances, accompanied by the hum of their portable infusion pumps and the wail of new air-raid sirens.
