As She Gave the Milk-bottle to the baby~~ The Missile Took Them Both (from Russia W 💗 )

 By Kim BarkerPhotographs by Brendan Hoffman

Kim Barker, reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, reconstructed the attack using text messages, cellphone photos, security-camera videos and more than a dozen interviews.

 

The missile wreckage fell from the sky on a Monday afternoon, a clumsy dagger that buried itself in the top floor of the Adonis clinic in central Kyiv. It caused an explosion that sent up a large plume of black smoke, blew out the windows in the back, ripped holes through the walls like tissue and arbitrarily spared items like a piggy bank and a carton of cream.

Within minutes, the news had spread among staff members.

“Is everybody alive?” one worker who was off that day asked on the staff Telegram chat.

No one answered. Another plea came 13 minutes later. “When you can, write to us how it’s going.” Then another, more distressed. “It’s horrible, But write everything’s OK.”

Nine minutes passed.

“Not everybody,” came the reply.

This past summer was the deadliest three-month stretch for civilians in Ukraine since the initial onslaught of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, according to the United Nations. Many of the victims in these attacks can seem almost invisible, just numbers added to a civilian death toll that is likely much higher than the official U.N. tally of about 12,000. 

One of the deadliest days was July 8, when Russian missiles rained down across Ukraine, killing at least 41 people and injuring scores. Much of the world’s attention focused on the devastation at Ohmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital. A Russian missile slipped through Kyiv’s air-defense system, killing two adults and sending bloodied children running in terror.

Largely overshadowed was a strike several hours later at Adonis, a clinic five miles to the east that specialized in maternity care.

This is the story of that clinic and its workers, pieced together through interviews with more than a dozen survivors and family members, text messages, cellphone photos and security-camera videos. Adonis is one of more than 1,900 medical facilities damaged or destroyed since Russia’s full-scale invasion. In August, the World Health Organization said it had logged more attacks on the practice of health care in Ukraine than in any humanitarian emergency to date. 

 People grimly clear rubble in the aftermath of an explosion on an urban street.

Rescuers and volunteers clearing rubble after a Russian missile strike on the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv. Hours later, a strike hit the Adonis clinic nearby.

A row of smiling women in embroidered tops and dresses, bellow a green “Adonis” sign.

For a national holiday in May, the Adonis staff dressed in traditional embroidered vyshyvankas. They included Svitlana Poplavska, third from left, Oksana Korzh, fourth from left, and Viktoriia Bondarenko, third from right, who were all killed in the strike.Credit...via Kateryna Bondar

Though not all facilities are intentionally targeted, experts say Russia has historically attacked clinics and hospitals in conflicts to sow terror and push people to pressure their governments to surrender. 

On this summer day, it was a grim lottery who was at Adonis. Some workers went to a staff member’s birthday party at another of the clinic’s buildings. The medical director took the day off to help her mother, who had broken her hand. An engineer had driven to the children’s hospital to see if he could help dig people from the rubble.

Svitlana Poplavska, a gynecologist and obstetrician, had recently come back from her own maternity leave and was working part-time. Monday was one of her days.

Oksana Korzh, the clinic’s matron, who took care of things like getting clean sheets or new chairs, wanted to spend the day with her grandchildren. Her daughter had given birth to twins 11 days earlier. But she had to work.

“Bye bye, babies,” Ms. Korzh said that morning, kissing them on their heads. “Your grandmother will come in the evening.” 

‘A Circle of Help’

Dr. Olha Hyrina opened her first clinic in Kyiv in 1997 in three rented rooms. At the time, with the Soviet Union a recent memory, private clinics and hospitals were largely unheard-of in Ukraine.

Her husband came up with the name, Adonis, inspired by the red flower that in Greek myth sprang from the blood of a young mortal and the tears of the goddess Aphrodite, his lover. The flower, an anemone, can symbolize the loss of a loved one. But it also, Dr. Hyrina liked to tell people, has healing powers.

Eventually, Adonis expanded to 20 rooms, with ultrasounds and interns. It opened new clinics. In 2012, the company launched a flagship maternity hospital on a hill about 20 miles west of Kyiv, the capital, that could see 300 patients a day. It started to accept private medical insurance.

International patients visited, drawn by less expensive rates for in vitro fertilization and cosmetic procedures. A laboratory worked with stem cells. Adonis also offered surrogacy to hopeful parents from outside Ukraine.

 

Four-story buildings with holes torn in the facade by tank rounds.

The flagship Adonis maternity hospital, west of Kyiv, came under fire early in the full-scale invasion. 

Two people and a double stroller in a bare, fire-damaged room with some debris on its concrete floor.

Vitalii Hyrin, 40, chief operating officer of Adonis Medical Group, and his mother Olha Hyrina, 72, the founder, inside the flagship site after the attack there.

By early 2022, Adonis had 11 clinics in the Kyiv area. Dr. Hyrina, who kept her purplish black hair neatly styled and favored blouses with paisleys and beads, often described her mission as creating “a circle of help for women.”

In the days after Russian troops invaded that February, pushing toward Kyiv, the flagship hospital came under attack. A local soccer team arranged for buses to evacuate people. But some patients could not leave, including the women who were about to give birth. Staff members moved them to the basement, where they delivered babies in the darkness as shelling rang out above.

 Because of the war, most international patients stopped coming. Many pregnant women left the country to deliver their babies. Financial strains forced three more Adonis clinics to close.

Dr. Brahutsa, too, was killed when the missile fell on the Kyiv clinic.

But the original clinic, in a four-story building on the east bank of the Dnipro River, stayed open.