A Russian drone smashed into a hospital in the centre of Kyiv at about 3am on Friday, injuring three people and forcing the evacuation of dozens of patients, The Guardian reported. The drone hit the second floor of the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics and an adjoining 19th-century building.
Source: The Guardian via EuropeSays
The six-storey hospital stands in Kyiv's Shevchenkivskyi district, not far from the Danish and Romanian embassies. The blast blew out windows in nearby buildings, including the National Academy of Arts across the road, and drone debris set off a fire that partially destroyed the hospital's second floor, Ukraine's State Emergency Service said.
Three patients were injured, suffering minor wounds from glass fragments, and no one was killed at the hospital. Staff evacuated 30 patients and emergency rescuers brought seven more people out of the building. The institute's director, Roman Derkach, told the Kyiv Independent that medical services were temporarily suspended while the damage was cleared, patients were moved to undamaged wards or discharged, and no medical staff were injured.
Source: The Kyiv Independent via The Daily Flare
"We were asleep when there was this massive boom. We all jumped out of bed straight away. There was glass all over the floor. People were running about… If it had hit a little further to the left it would have been much worse." — Oleksandr, a witness in the hospital yard as firefighters led dazed patients to safety, speaking to The Guardian.
Part of a 117-drone overnight barrage
The hospital was hit during a wider overnight Russian attack. Ukraine's Air Force said Russia launched 117 long-range attack drones, including 63 jet-powered drones as well as Gerbera and simulator drones, and that by 7:30am on Friday Ukrainian air defences had intercepted 80 of them, including 39 jet-powered drones.
Across Ukraine, authorities reported that Russian attacks killed nine people and injured 61 over the preceding day, the Kyiv Independent reported — figures that cover many regions and are separate from the three injuries at the hospital itself.
Zelenskyy blames Starshield speed limits
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that speed restrictions on SpaceX's Starshield system — the military version of Starlink, operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX and overseen by the Pentagon — were again significantly disrupting Ukrainian defences, after an unexplained slowdown last month. He said some Russian drones got through because Ukrainian interceptor systems that rely on the US satellite service could not reach the speed needed to knock them out. A Ukrainian Defence Ministry source put the reported limit at 161 kilometres per hour in Russian-occupied territory, The Daily Flare reported. The White House has yet to explain why the service has been throttled for a second time, The Guardian said.
Russia, for its part, claimed it had shot down nearly 1,200 Ukrainian drones overnight — one of the largest swarms Kyiv has sent — and reported at least four people killed in its southern Volgograd region. Those are Russian claims and were not independently verified. Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure in the same period caused power outages in 12 regions, Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov said, naming Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Rivne, Sumy, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Chernihiv.
What happens next
The strike landed in the middle of intense US-led shuttle diplomacy. President Donald Trump's emissaries Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday and then flew to Dublin to brief Zelenskyy, after trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Kremlin is insisting Ukraine hand over four provinces and that NATO return to its pre-1997 posture, while France's President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that Europe must take part in any settlement: "Without Europeans, there is no support for Ukraine." Ukraine says Russia's stepped-up strikes on civilian infrastructure — power plants, passenger trains, bridges and now a hospital — are a campaign of terror meant to make a weary population capitulate; Moscow has not commented on the hospital strike itself in the reporting available.
The hospital strike came as US negotiators were floating the hardest question of the talks — whether Ukraine would trade territory for a NATO seat. Read: US asked if Ukraine would trade Donbas for a NATO seat, Zelenskiy says