Ukraine: No safe places as bombs kill more

Kyiv is home to Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) coordination offices. MSF teams live and work in the city.

“Our colleagues spent last night in metro stations, others had no choice but to wake their children and shelter at home as best they could, while explosions shook the ground and rattled windows,” says Thomas Marchese, MSF’s programme director in Ukraine.

On the same day, a drone strike hit a bus in Marhanets, Dnipro, reportedly killing nine people and wounding 50. MSF paramedics referred survivors with significant blood loss and shrapnel wounds.

This latest wave of bombings continues a pattern in Ukraine: strikes on hospitals, residential buildings and schools occur each day.

MSF paramedics responded to one that killed 20 people, including nine children, in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, on 5 April. One of the survivors: a seven-year-old girl who suffered a fractured hip, haemorrhagic shock and shrapnel wounds.

“No one is safe,” says Marchese. “People are exhausted and many live in fear.” MSF mobile clinics are, he adds, reporting a rise in cases of heart attacks and strokes—conditions linked directly to prolonged stress. “People can be hit while commuting, buying bread or dropping their children at kindergarten. There’s no warning—just seconds between normal life and extreme violence. Civilians must never be targets.”

Nor should humanitarian workers and hospital patients. About 2,000 medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed since the war escalated in 2022. In recent months, hospitals across the country have faced multiple mass casualty events and have even become targets, particularly in areas near the frontline where the health system is already under pressure.
 

MSF is responding by sending paramedics to support emergency services in the Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Sumy oblasts (provinces) while its surgical teams provide lifesaving care in hospitals close to active conflict areas. Rehabilitation care, including physiotherapy and mental health, continues in Cherkasy and Odesa. In Vinnytsia, an MSF mental health team provides treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among medical facilities in Ukraine, it seems one thing is constant: the influx of wounded never truly stops.