'I'm not hurt! I'm alive!" I hear my father's agitated voice over the phone. The day is July 8, when 38 Russian missiles attacked Ukraine. Several of them hit Kyiv residential areas. Even though I live in Kyiv and get used to air-raid alerts, it's just hard to believe it's my family's turn now to become part of the target of the Russian missiles. "There was an attack. It's our building. I think someone was killed. I've got to go," my father hangs up, leaving me completely lost.
One of the severely attacked targets is Okhmatdyt -- the largest children's hospital in Ukraine. Two other hospitals are targeted in Kyiv that day.
I'm a journalist, and I've been covering Russian attacks since day one of the Russian invasion, but when it came to me personally, I was not prepared. Like other civilians, I frantically rush to see my father. His company has been renting an office in a building that has just been attacked in another part of the city. The biggest space of the building is where two private clinics are based. One of them, Isida, is a famous private reproductive clinic that offers services for pregnant women and newborns.
I met my father at the site, along with paramedic teams, firefighters, and investigators dutifully rescuing people. The building now has a smoking hole. The missile hit when office staff were working, and some of them could not run away in time when the alert was made, as it went off only when the missile hit the building. My father miraculously survived. Two of his colleagues and another seven people in the building, mostly doctors and patients, were killed.
It's hard to believe this is a simple coincidence. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, several international and human rights organizations, including eyeWitness to Atrocities, Media Initiative for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Ukrainian Healthcare Centre, have recorded 1,442 attacks on medical facilities in Ukraine. In 742 cases, hospitals and clinics were damaged, and at least 210 medical workers have been killed.
Together with my colleagues at The Reckoning Project, I've been researching Russian attacks on hospitals for the past two years. We've started with the bombardment of the Mariupol maternity house #3, where three people were killed, including a heavily pregnant woman and her unborn child. We've documented testimonies of the surviving witnesses from the hospital and handed these testimonies over to the general prosecutor's office.
I was in the midst of this case when I learned I was pregnant. Researching Russian attacks on maternity hospitals also became my personal goal. I needed to know if such tactics were deliberate acts, as I was planning to deliver my child in Kyiv. So, I investigated Russia's track record in recent wars.
Ukraine is not the first country to face Russia's indiscriminate tactics against civilians, according to Janine di Giovanni, the executive director of The Reckoning Project. As a journalist, Ms Di Giovanni covered Russian President Vladimir Putin's wars in Chechnya and Syria. In October 1999, Russian missiles hit the centre of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, and the only operating maternity hospital, killing at least 30 people, including women and newborn children, according to AP reporting on that day.
Russian human rights organisation Memorial investigated the case and reported that Russian missiles attacked unprotected areas of the city. Like in Mariupol, Russian troops besieged and flattened Grozny with constant bombardments.
Nearly two decades later, in Syria, Russian airstrikes on Aleppo destroyed almost all of the city's hospitals and medical facilities by 2016. "The hospitals in Aleppo were a very clear target," Ms Di Giovanni said."To kill doctors was a strategy because if you kill one doctor, you kill 100 people."
Attacking civilians is a war stratagem of breaking down any resistance. "You can destroy the fabric of society by depriving people of their fundamental rights. And I don't even mean civil liberties. I mean the right to have water, the right to have food, the right to educate your children, and the right to feel safe in your home. What Putin and his bombers did was destroy it, flatten it," Ms Di Giovanni said.
To deal with such a cruel stratagem, projects like The Reckoning Project aim to collect records to bring those responsible for the war crimes to justice. We believe that there are stronger prospects of prosecution in the Ukraine case. Already, Ukrainian prosecutors are trying cases in domestic courts, and there is political will and instruments for investigating and taking legal action.
Ibrahim Olabi, legal director at The Reckoning Project, says better technology, more coordinated international intelligence, and state radar services are helping Ukrainian investigators. However, Ukraine has a better chance of identifying the perpetrators. "In Syria, we were saying, 'Tell us who's flying over us,' but nobody did," said Mr Olabi. "We had people near the airports as informants, risking their lives to get information about the jets."
In cases like attacks on hospitals, especially maternity wards, criminal accountability is associated with two parties: those who physically committed the crime and the commander who's responsible both for giving the orders and for not preventing the attack. Hospitals are protected under the Geneva Convention.
My son was born in Kyiv in 2023, and I continue my work on researching Russian war crimes. By the time he was born, I had realised that hospitals, vulnerable civilians such as pregnant women, newborns, the elderly, and doctors were targets of Russian attacks.
In response, if we keep resisting and doing our jobs, there's a good chance justice will come one day, and then those innocently killed will be vindicated. As a result of the Russian attacks on Kyiv on July 8, 33 people were killed, and 121 were injured. We need to continue our work to bring culprits to justice, which also helps prevent similar attacks. On that horrific day, as we travelled back home, my father murmured about his friends who died in the raid. "You know, the doctor who got killed, he was such an outgoing man. Whenever I met him walking down the corridor, he'd always smile". His name was Victor Brahutsa, a specialist in ultrasound diagnostics. His name and others who died on that day go down in the collective memory of our nation.
Angelina Kariakina is a journalist within The Reckoning Project -- an initiative of Ukrainian and international journalists, lawyers, and analysts to document war crimes committed during the war against Ukraine.