Emergency workers search for survivors of a missile strike on the Okhmadyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday that killed at least two people and injured 16 in a wave of deadly Russian attacks on cities across central and eastern regions of the country. Photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE
July 8 (UPI) — At least 31 people were killed and more than 100 injured Monday as dozens of Russian missiles slammed into cities across Eastern and Central Ukraine including the capital, Kyiv, where a children’s hospital was badly damaged, authorities said.
Most of the fatalities were in Kryvyi Rih, 90 miles southwest of Dnipro, and Kyiv where at least 17 people were killed and 48 injured in an unusual daytime raid including two at the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital in the east of the city where 16 people were injured, including seven children along with four at a private maternity clinic.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on social media that 15 of the injured were at Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital were being treated at hospitals.
A doctor and another adult were killed in the attack on the specialist children’s hospital, the largest in the capital, Klitschko added.
“This is horror and genocide! More than a hundred rescuers are sifting through the debris in the children’s hospital, which was targeted by an enemy rocket,” he said. “Patients from the children’s hospital are being evacuated to the municipal hospital in the city.”
Footage circulating online showed serious damage to the hospital’s interior and exterior and children with IV drips outside awaiting evacuation as palls of smoke rose across the capital.
An Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital doctor told the BBC that 60%-70% of the complex had sustained severe damage with one part destroyed and another wing ablaze.
Health Minister Viktor Lyashko said cancer and intensive care were among the departments struck.
People caught out on the street took refuge underground in the nearby Lukianivska subway station.
Shortly afterward, four people were killed and three injured when the Isida maternity hospital, a private clinic, in the Dniprovskyi area of the city was hit by falling debris from a Russian missile downed by the city’s air defenses.
It is not yet known if the victims were patients or hospital staff.
President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack on the hospital as well as residential buildings and infrastructure saying Russia could not claim ignorance of where its missiles are flying and must be held to account.
“Russia must be held fully accountable for all its crimes. Against people, against children, against humanity in general. It is very important that the world does not remain silent about this now, and that everyone sees what Russia is and what it is doing,” he wrote in a post on X.
In Dnipropetrovsk province, 260 miles to the southeast of Kyiv, the military administration of Kryvyi Rih said at least 10 people had been killed there and 47 injured with one person killed and 12 injured to the East in Denipro, the country’s fourth largest city.
Three more people were killed in the town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, according to the province’s governor Vadym Filashkin.
