Ever-mounting death toll of Russia's state-sponsored medical terror against Ukraine
Russia’s recent bombing of Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s main children’s hospital in Kyiv, was no isolated attack, and almost certainly no accident. Since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has bombed or shelled 1,856 Ukrainian hospitals, including maternity wards, and other medical establishments, with 214 of these totally destroyed. The invaders have also destroyed, damaged or seized a huge number of ambulances.
In reporting these figures on 5 August, Ukraine’s Health Ministry warned that the real picture may be worse as there is no way of obtaining full information about the degree of devastation on occupied territory. Since seizing Mariupol, for example, Russia has systematically sought to hide the evidence of its most egregious war crimes, including the bombing on 9 March 2022 of a maternity hospital. Among those killed were a heavily pregnant woman and her baby and a 3-year-old little girl.
While international humanitarian law, for example, the Fourth Geneva Convention, is unambiguous in saying that civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack,”, it has proven frustratingly toothless against the Russian aggressor state. It is also not a blanket ban since the protection ceases (after warnings, etc) if the civilian hospitals “are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.”
Russia even tried to use this caveat back in March 2022 over its bombing of the Maternity Hospital in Mariupol. Although initially it denied any involvement, on 10 March 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov asserted, without a shred of evidence, that the hospital had been used as a military base by Ukraine’s Azov Regiment. There was far too much evidence that this was not the case, and Russia has since tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians and used other methods of coercion to try to rewrite the facts and blame Ukraine for its crimes.
The attack on 8 July 2024 on the Okhmatdyt Hospital in Kyiv was part of a mass Russian bombing attack on several Ukrainian cities. Russia did not then try to claim that the children’s hospital was a covert military target, instead asserting that the damage was somehow caused by Ukraine’s air defence system. In fact, there is video footage clearly showing the Russian X-101 missile headed straight at the hospital.
There were absolutely no military targets around the children’s hospital in Kyiv and there was no possibility that it was unaware how many children, parents and medical personnel would be in the hospital. The timing, on a Monday morning, meant that it was very likely that operations were already underway with this making the number of potential victims from among the youngest and most vulnerable of patients even higher.
Although international outrage led to Russia publicly shouting ‘provocation’ and trying to blame Ukraine’s air defence system, no attempt was ever made to refute the shocking position expressed, also publicly, by Andrei Perla, a prominent Russian propagandist. He ‘justified’ Russia’s missile attack on children by denying that the latter are people. “We must acknowledge the simple and terrible [truth] that there are no people on the other side. Not one person. Our missiles do not kill people, not one person. There are no people there. <> “Simple and terrible, but we shouldn’t try to justify ourselves for hitting a children’s hospital. We need to say: do you want it to stop? Then surrender. Capitulate. And then, perhaps, we will spare you.”
In fact, the statistics demonstrate that Russia has been committing such attacks on civilian hospitals since 24 February 2022, and only bothers with denials or implausible claims about ‘provocation’, etc. when it cannot completely ignore international attention.
On 14 February 2024, for example, the Russians bombed the maternity ward of the hospital in Selydove (Donetsk oblast). They killed a pregnant woman, another woman, aged 36, and her nine-year-old son. In November 2022, the Russians struck a maternity ward in Vilniansk (Zaporizhzhia oblast), killing a baby born just two days earlier. In fact, the attack on Okhmatdyt was just one of two strikes on hospitals on 8 July 2024, with the other a private maternity hospital.
In very many of these attacks, Russia has also killed doctors and other medical personnel. It has also abducted a large number of military and some civilian medics, many of whom remain imprisoned to this day.
Not all Russia’s attacks on medical establishments are widely reported outside Ukraine, but they are certainly recorded, with evidence gathered by Ukrainian prosecutors, international monitors and NGOs. Several reports, including two by Physicians for Human Rights; the Media Initiative for Human Rights and other NGOs, have analysed the multiple ways in which Russia is targeting Ukrainian healthcare institutions and medical personnel. During the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an average of two attacks, including the bombing of hospitals, torture of medics and shooting at ambulances, had been carried out each day. One of the many reasons for suspecting that the hospitals were deliberately targeted was that many have internationally recognizable symbols on the buildings which were clearly visible from the air.
The evidence amassed in the first report, Destruction and Devastation: One Year of Russia’s Assault on Ukraine’s Health Care System, prompted the authors to conclude that Russia has also deliberately “targeted Ukraine’s health system as part of a broader attack on Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure.” Co-author, Christian de Vos, from Physicians for Human Rights, stated that “evidence strongly suggests these acts constitute war crimes and a course of conduct that could potentially constitute crimes against humanity as well.”
The same NGOs published a second report in December 2023 entitled “Coercion and Control: Ukraine’s Health Care System Under Russian Occupation”. This provides more details about the methods reported here that Russia is using to force Ukrainians on occupied territory to accept Russian citizenship. Russia began by making critically needed medication, such as insulin, only available to those who agreed to accept a Russian passport. Since the beginning of 2024, the same restrictions have been applied to everybody with medical personnel under pressure themselves to police such medical terrorism. The authors call for “meaningful accountability for these violations of law” and call on international bodies to investigate and prosecute such crimes. Without this, they warn, Russia’s invading forces “will continue to act with impunity”.