‘The Screams of Children’
Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure has slowly eroded care at medical centers.
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As the world prepares for another dysfunctional, Ukraine-hating Trump administration, President Biden has been rushing weapons to Ukraine to put the country “in the strongest possible position” before the January inauguration. His $725 million security package, announced this week, contains artillery and rockets, but also “other critical capabilities to help Ukraine defend its freedom and independence.”
This final (albeit vague) tenet is fundamental, considering that Ukraine is a couple years into suffering constant power outages and disruptions to water supplies. As of June 2024, Ukraine’s electrical capacity was down to just 27 percent. Coordinated, systematic bombing and the disruption of gas deliveries from Russia, among other things, has destroyed the majority of Ukraine’s energy sources, as well as all the country’s thermal power plants and nearly all hydroelectric output, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
But a lack of electricity is not just a matter of inconvenience; these interruptions of service are literally killing people.
A report out today from the New York-based nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Kyiv-based organization Truth Hounds explains the impact the disruptions have had on Ukraine’s medical sector. They are significant.
Not only have the targeted attacks on medical facilities debilitated medical professionals’ ability to treat patients, but they have caused unnecessary deaths and put health care workers and patients in peril.
Multiple attacks from Russia have, for example, caused suffering at Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt National Specialized Children’s Hospital. “Airstrikes shattered its windows in March 2022, forcing vulnerable patients, including terminally ill and immunocompromised children, to be treated underground despite the grave health risks of doing so,” according to the report.
In October 2022, Russia launched a missile that struck one of the hospital’s doctors, who was on her way to work. In the days after this, “frequent power outages lasting up to several days resulted in lights shutting off in all departments but intensive care,” said Dr. Lesia Lysytsia, a pediatric ophthalmological surgeon. “The energy cuts jeopardized patient health by interrupting or delaying surgeries; forcing surgeons to operate in darkness illuminated only by headlamps; discontinuing flow of water to the hospital, creating unhygienic conditions; and rendering diagnostic and treatment equipment unusable.”
Dr. Anastasiia Zakharova, a pediatrician and department head at Okhmatdyt, recalls of a missile strike in June: “It was dark and dusty.” There were “beeping devices, signaling errors [and] the screams of children.”
With only temporary generators taking days to restore services, Dr. Lysytsia told PHR: “You can work in this mode for a couple of years, but not forever. … For me, Okhmatdyt was a fortress. I thought a children’s hospital wouldn’t get hit.”
And it’s not just patients who have been affected by the failures in life-support systems and failures of diagnostic equipment, it’s also hurt the people who help the injured and sick. More than 80 percent of health workers experienced “increased stress, burnout, and other challenges due to these attacks on energy infrastructure and disruption of services, with 27 percent facing these hardships daily,” according to the report.
On a personal note, I actually know the authors of this report quite well. I worked closely for maybe seven years with PHR on the gang rapes of 50 little girls in a small Congolese village, and I worked with Truth Hounds when I was reporting on alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Which is to say, I trust both these organizations after many years of watching how they work.
Another way I respect both these groups is that they always have their eyes on justice.
“Preliminary analysis suggests that these attacks may constitute violations of international law,” the report authors write, “including the laws of war and the human rights to life and health, and in some cases may give rise to criminal culpability as a matter of international criminal law.”
This effort, as the report authors point out, requires investigators to focus on this abomination against the energy sector, that the government require investigation of alleged abuses and, last but hardly least, the international pressure that will allow medical professionals to carry out their live-saving treatments and to fully document the abuses they are enduring.
First comes documentation, then comes, hopefully, prosecution.
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What the people of Ukraine have endured is surreal. That the medical centers are targeted is a travesty. Russia is evil incarnate.