Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital was directly hit during a deadly Russian missile attack on Kiev on July 8. More than 600 patients and at least as many medical staff were in Okhmatdyt Hospital at the time of the attack, which killed two adults and wounded more than 50 people, including seven children. Another child who was evacuated from the hospital later died. After the attack, Meduza interviewed Anna Brudna, a doctor at Okhmatdyt’s bone marrow transplant unit who was at the hospital at the time of the attack. Here’s what she saw.
In the coming days, all donations to Let’s Help (a fundraising campaign co-founded by Meduza to support Ukrainian citizens affected by the Russian war) will go to Okhmatdyt Hospital in Kiev, the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine.
Anna Brudna was working in a waiting room when she heard the first explosion. A colleague suggested that everyone go into the hallway in case the windows blew out. But Brudna didn’t listen; as a doctor in the bone marrow transplant department of the Okhmatydyt Children’s Hospital in Kiev, she had too much work to do.
“The patients we are preparing for transplants are hooked up to machines and kept on IVs in sterile isolation rooms. If we were to run somewhere every time there was an air raid, we simply wouldn’t be able to treat anyone,” Brudna told Meduza.
The sound of explosions came closer, and doctors began moving patients out of the wards and into the corridor. Then, Brudna said, it was like an earthquake: there was a loud noise and the walls were shaking. The head of the ward came in and said that patients had to be moved quickly to the parking garage and the basement, which also serves as the hospital’s bomb shelter.
Brudna walked into the hallway and saw all the ceiling tiles strewn across the floor. “The shock wave had turned everything upside down,” she said.
‘An IV is like life itself’
Hospital staff immediately began evacuating patients. Junior nurses had shrapnel removed from their bodies and then returned to work. The explosion had shattered the glass in all the isolation rooms. Two doctors ran out of a conference room seconds before one of the walls collapsed.
The elevators were not working, so there was no choice but to take the stairs. “Mothers and nurses helped patients down the stairs, including children who had lost limbs (earlier) from Russian shelling, bedridden children from the blood cancer ward, and children in wheelchairs,” Brudna recalls.
“Down below we saw a mother holding her child in her arms and crying very hard. Her child was on the operating table at the time of the attack. As soon as we heard the explosion, the power went out immediately — and (trying to) complete an operation in such conditions…” Brudna fell silent. “She didn’t know what was going to happen to him.”
Brudna helped evacuate bone marrow transplant patients who were on IVs, including children undergoing chemotherapy. “Our patients are children who have no blood cell production and no immune system. So they are put on ventilators; they need blood and platelet transfusions so they don’t die of anemia. They simply don’t produce their own blood cells during the treatment period,” the doctor explained. “For a cancer patient, an IV is like life (itself).”
“Patients who are undergoing transfusions usually do not leave the isolation room,” she continued. “Because of (this) terrorist attack, our children inhaled smoke, dirt, dust, (and) came into contact with other patients. These are incredibly bad conditions (for them).”
Anna Brudna’s personal archive
Anna Brudna’s personal archive
Some patients experienced dizziness, headaches and vomiting during evacuation. The bone marrow transplant unit staff knew they had to resume treatment immediately.
“We calculated the medicines we needed for the coming week, loaded the children onto a bus and went to another hospital where the nurses immediately resumed all treatment processes,” Brudna told Meduza. “We can’t stop (the treatment) even for an hour. So we have four bone marrow transplants scheduled for this week — and we’re going to do all of them according to the schedule that was drawn up before the terrorist attack.”
‘Now our patients are spread out’
The Russian missile strike on Okhmatdyt killed two adults, including one of the hospital’s doctors — a kidney specialist named Svetlana Lukyanchuk. According to Brudna, Lukyanchuk was in another building that was completely destroyed in the strike.
This is not the first time Okhmatdyt has lost one of its doctors in a Russian attack. On October 10, 2022, pediatric hematologist Oksana Leontieva was killed by a Russian missile strike while on her way to work. “It was morning, we were taking over from the nurses (and) the air raid siren was already blaring,” Brudna recalled. “Oksana wrote in the department’s group message that she was late because (…) she had to take (her son) Hryhorii to her parents’ house. This was our last message from her.”
“At noon, I saw our nurse very upset and in tears, and I heard from her that Oksana was dead. We hugged (and) she kept asking me if it was a mistake. But then our (department) chief, Oleksandr Lysytsia, sent a photo to the work chat of Oksana’s burned-out car. This photo was taken by her father.”
After the July 8 strike in Okhmatdyt, Brudna and her colleagues tried to assess the damage to the hospital themselves. The damage to the new building, which opened in 2020 after extensive renovations, will take at least several months to repair, Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Liashko said on July 10.
Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers cover the windows of Okhmatdyt hospital with plywood, the day after the rocket attack
Anatolii Stepanov / AFP / Scanpix / LETA
Medical staff remove equipment from an operating room damaged in the rocket attack
Anatolii Stepanov / AFP / Scanpix / LETA
A corridor in Okhmatdyt after the rocket attack
Maxym Marusenko / NurPhoto / Getty Images
“Our department is on the third floor (of the new building): the blast wave tore out the ceilings, ripped out wires and destroyed the water supply systems. In other words, there is no water and the first floors are also flooded,” Brudna told Meduza. “Higher up — in the operating rooms and intensive care units — expensive equipment is damaged. How can we work?”
The hospital’s toxicology department, where children were undergoing dialysis at the time of the strike, was completely destroyed. “(The doctors) there helped restore kidney function to children from all over Ukraine — they literally lived in this department,” Brudna said.
The intensive care unit, which houses children who cannot survive without ventilators, has also been completely destroyed, she added. “Now our patients are scattered across many hospitals in Kiev and even (throughout) Ukraine. But I don’t know many places (with such advanced equipment) — there is a chance that someone will need treatment that they cannot get.”
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When Brudna spoke to Meduza on Tuesday, workers were still clearing rubble at Okhmatdyt Hospital. Medical staff will not be able to return to work there until the infrastructure is fully restored, she said. “Even if one department is fully restored, we cannot work without the others! In order to continue transplant work, the entire hospital must function,” the doctor stressed.
Brudna believes that Russian attacks on civilian targets are aimed at “intimidating, breaking and forcing (Ukrainians) to negotiate.” “We are ready for anything. You understand that your life can end — maybe even today — but this does not take away your desire to live and fight,” she said.
“We have become accustomed to the air raid sirens — and we stay in the hospital even when attacks are coming to the city. I hardly cry anymore (and when I have no strength left at all, I start laughing hysterically). When we say goodbye to our colleagues, instead of saying ‘see you later’, we say: ‘If something happens to me, you know that my patients will need this and that.’ We got into this habit after Oksana was killed. And every new attack reinforces it.”
Brudna hopes that Western countries will listen to Ukrainians and consider their experiences as a reason for “real action and not just expressions of sympathy and concern.” “I am grateful for the help and attention, but I would like to see a mechanism found to influence Russia so that this stops,” the doctor said. “Then I wouldn’t have to give these kinds of interviews, you know?”
On Wednesday, Health Minister Liashko reported that a boy who was in critical condition in the Okhmatdyt intensive care unit at the time of the rocket attack had died in another hospital in Kiev. At the time of writing, the death toll from the Russian attack stands at three: one doctor, one parent and one child.
Interview by Lilia Japparová
Written for Meduza-in-English by Eilish Hart
