Mapped: Russian missile attacks kill dozens of people in Ukraine

July 9, 2024

At least 43 people were killed and around 190 injured when Russia fired more than 40 missiles at Ukraine in one of its deadliest attacks.

In the capital Kiev, a children’s hospital where many cancer patients were treated and a nearby maternity ward were hit by rockets. It was the heaviest Russian bombardment of the city in almost four months. Seven of the city’s ten districts were hit. At least 29 people were killed in the capital, including two employees of the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital.

The footage showed hundreds of rescue workers gathering outside the hospital, desperately trying to rescue people buried under the rubble.

“This is what Russian terrorism looks like,” said Olena Shuliak, the leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. “People without honor and conscience attacked the hospital and other civilian objects in broad daylight.”

“We are dealing with concentrated evil that will never forgive. The world must unite to stop the land of murderers once and for all.”

Further south, rockets hit the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kryvyi Rih. At least ten people were killed and dozens more were injured.

The head of the military administration in the region, Yevhen Sytnychenko, said search and rescue operations in the area were being hampered by air raid sirens and reports of further rocket attacks on the city later in the day.

And 145 kilometers to the east, also in the Dnipropetrovsk region, another person was killed and six others injured in a second attack.

Further east, three more people were killed in Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, according to local governor Vadym Filashkin, while further attacks occurred in the nearby towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Since the beginning of the war, now in its third year, Russian officials have regularly claimed that Moscow’s forces would never attack civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Since the war began, more than 1,600 medical facilities have been damaged and 214 have been completely destroyed, according to statistics released last month by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.

Colonel Yuri Ignat of the Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had improved the effectiveness of its air strikes and equipped its missiles with special systems, including so-called heat traps that evade air defense systems.

In Monday’s attack, the cruise missiles flew only 50 meters above the ground and were therefore harder to hit, he said in a comment sent to AP.