At a Ukraine Maternity Clinic, Deaths From an Airstrike Shatter a Community

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. Write that 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.