Agency Report

A young Ukrainian mother was recovering after giving birth to twins in one of Kyiv’s top maternity hospitals when shrapnel punched a hole in the window, scattering shattered glass inside.

The next day, after a night in a bunker, she and the other mothers and babies were evacuated and the clinic became a frontline aid station for wounded soldiers and civilians.

On Thursday, with the world stunned by the far more devastating Russian strike on another maternity unit in the southern city of Mariupol, the hospital director had a message for Western leaders.

Valeriy Zukin was a world-renowned expert in maternal health and CEO of a private clinic in the wooded suburbs of northern Kyiv. Now he is running emergency care for the war wounded.

He does not want humanitarian aid from the West — he wants Ukraine to have political and military support, to enable it to see off the Russian invasion without surrender.

“I have lots of questions from abroad: ‘Which kinds of humanitarian therapy do you need?’ I prefer to buy the pills, not to receive from charity,” he told AFP.

“It’s like asking a man with a noose round his neck if he needs water. First get the noose off our necks.”

Zukin’s Leleka clinic, a short distance from the frontline village of Horenka, has not suffered the massive destruction of the Mariupol maternity hospital which was hit by Russian air strikes on Wednesday, triggering global outrage.

But the glass in the front door of the hospital was shattered by shrapnel, and there are two holes in the facade, one where the post-natal recovery room hosting the recovering mother was hit.

Now the mothers and babies are gone, sent home or moved to hospitals further from the guns, in central Kyiv.

But Leleka remains open, and an olive green military ambulance — itself pockmarked by shrapnel hits — is parked behind the statue of a stork bearing a child.