'A room covered in blood'

A mother and daughter caught up in the Russian missile strike on a Kyiv children’s hospital speak to Tom Watling

- Tom Watling

Olena Danylova and her eight-year-old daughter watched as black smoke started to seep through the ceiling into the bomb shelter where they had just fled a Russian missile attack. Moments earlier, her young daughter, who she asked not to be named, had been preparing to have hernia surgery at the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in central Kyiv.

The doctor had been preparing her for the operation on the fifth floor; the surgery was to take place on the seventh floor. She was next in line for an operation. Then they heard the first explosions, somewhere in the distance. The three of them – mother, daughter, doctor – stopped in their tracks. All three knew full well that the most dangerous place to be during a missile attack is high up.

“Then we heard another explosion, a bigger one … and we ran as fast as we could down to the bunker,” she said. When they got down to the shelter – dozens of children and parents in front and behind them – they tried to stay calm. But the reality of what was happening was terrifying.

The two bombs, believed to be Russian Kh-101 cruise missiles, had hit nearby buildings, but one of the explosions had blown out the windows of the operating floors on the sixth and seventh levels of their building, sending shards of glass hurtling towards the patients and surgeons. Olena’s daughter had been just moments away from heading to surgery.

“The kid that was before my daughter was in the middle of the operation when the bomb hit, so they had to stop and wake him up, and then run to the shelter,” she said. “They told us the whole room was covered in blood.”