It was early afternoon Monday when Vitaliy Gyrin, MD, director of the Adonis-IVF maternity network in Ukraine, started getting the calls.
"People started calling and said, 'The tanks are getting close,'" Gyrin told 乌鸦传媒.
Neighbors of the Adonis Maternity House in Busova, near Kyiv, alerted Gyrin that Russian troops were standing about 200 meters, or less than a quarter of a mile, from the facility. Gyrin said he immediately began to plan how to evacuate patients and staff, who had been sheltering in the basement for the previous 2 days.
Buses quickly transported 45 people (around 30 patients) to another one of the Adonis maternity facilities (Gyrin did not disclose the location for safety reasons), and all patients and staff were successfully evacuated.
In the late afternoon on February 28, Russian tanks struck the Busova hospital. Gyrin stated that "A missile hit the maternity clinic," according to .
The hospital sustained damage to the roof and its top floors. "The damage is huge, but the building is standing," Gyrin wrote in a February 28 .
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine rages on, there have been increased reports of attacks on civilian areas, including bombings on hospitals and other medical facilities. A different maternity hospital in Zhytomyr was bombed on Wednesday, according to .
"There is credible evidence that Russia has attacked at least three hospitals in Ukraine, and there are reports of others," Leonard Rubenstein, JD, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said in a press statement.
"These war crimes are part of a pattern of Russian conduct," he added, which includes hospital bombings during its war in Chechnya 2 decades ago, and attacks on medical facilities during the ongoing war in Syria.
"Violence against hospitals, doctors, and other health workers undermines long-standing values and laws designed to ensure that sick and wounded people receive care," said Rubenstein, who is the director for the Program on Human Rights, Health and Conflict at the school's Center for Public Health and Human Rights.
The Busova facility is one of 10 Adonis maternity hospitals in the Kyiv region, Gyrin said. Post-evacuation, Gyrin and his staff have focused on getting the resources they need to care for their patients, he explained. The hospital that took in the evacuated patients is seeing more deliveries (up to 17 per day versus around five or six daily), and must overcome medical supply shortages, treat patients in a crowded maternity ward, and take care of staff, he noted.
Food and medical supplies are delivered by local volunteers. With roads blocked, or simply deemed unsafe, deliveries, such as medicines for newborns, have been delayed.
Gyrin stated that some new mothers are accompanied by their entire families in the maternity ward, with whole households arriving for the birth, and to keep the family together. A few families have stayed longer than necessary after delivery because they fear traveling home in dangerous conditions with a newborn, he said.
"It's a lot of people in one building. It's tough, but we can do it," Gyrin noted.
In addition, doctors and nurses are working tirelessly to keep patients safe, he said. Even before the Busova facility was attacked, some providers worked for 5 days straight, as other staff members, who were not at the hospital, wanted to return to work, but could not get to the facility after surrounding roads and bridges were destroyed.
While respite arrived in the form of replacement workers at the new facility, many providers work in fear and worry about the safety of their own families as they stay away for days at a time, Gyrin said.
"These are very brave people," Gyrin stressed. "They are heroes, that's for sure. [Doctors] see people who have been bombed ... with injuries, and they need to help. We don't think about anything else."