At a Ukraine Maternity Clinic, Deaths From an Airstrike Shatter a Community

The missile wreckage fell from the sky on a Monday afternoon, a clumsy dagger that buried itself in the top floor of the Adonis clinic in central Kyiv. It caused an explosion that sent up a large plume of black smoke, blew out the windows in the back, ripped holes through the walls like tissue and arbitrarily spared items like a piggy bank and a carton of cream.

Within minutes, the news had spread among staff members.

“Is everybody alive?” one worker who was off that day asked on the staff Telegram chat.

No one answered. Another plea came 13 minutes later. “When you can, write to us how it’s going.” Then another, more distressed. “It’s horrible. Write that everything’s OK.”

Nine minutes passed.

“Not everybody,” came the reply.

This past summer was the deadliest three-month stretch for civilians in Ukraine since the initial onslaught of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, according to the United Nations. Many of the victims in these attacks can seem almost invisible, just numbers added to a civilian death toll that is likely much higher than the official U.N. tally of about 12,000.

One of the deadliest days was July 8, when Russian missiles rained down across Ukraine, killing at least 41 people and injuring scores. Much of the world’s attention focused on the devastation at Ohmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital. A Russian missile slipped through Kyiv’s air-defense system, killing two adults and sending bloodied children running in terror.

Largely overshadowed was a strike several hours later at Adonis, a clinic five miles to the east that specialized in maternity care.

This is the story of that clinic and its workers, pieced together through interviews with more than a dozen survivors and family members, text messages, cellphone photos and security-camera videos. Adonis is one of more than 1,900 medical facilities damaged or destroyed since Russia’s full-scale invasion. In August, the World Health Organization said it had logged more attacks on the practice of health care in Ukraine than in any humanitarian emergency to date.

Though not all facilities are intentionally targeted, experts say Russia has historically attacked clinics and hospitals in conflicts to sow terror and push people to pressure their governments to surrender.

On this summer day, it was a grim lottery who was at Adonis. Some workers went to a staff member’s birthday party at another of the clinic’s buildings. The medical director took the day off to help her mother, who had broken her hand. An engineer had driven to the children’s hospital to see if he could help dig people from the rubble.

Svitlana Poplavska, a gynecologist and obstetrician, had recently come back from her own maternity leave and was working part-time. Monday was one of her days.

Oksana Korzh, the clinic’s matron, who took care of things like getting clean sheets or new chairs, wanted to spend the day with her grandchildren. Her daughter had given birth to twins 11 days earlier. But she had to work.

“Bye bye, babies,” Ms. Korzh said that morning, kissing them on their heads. “Your grandmother will come in the evening.”

‘A Circle of Help’

Dr. Olha Hyrina opened her first clinic in Kyiv in 1997 in three rented rooms. At the time, with the Soviet Union a recent memory, private clinics and hospitals were largely unheard-of in Ukraine.

Her husband came up with the name, Adonis, inspired by the red flower that in Greek myth sprang from the blood of a young mortal and the tears of the goddess Aphrodite, his lover. The flower, an anemone, can symbolize the loss of a loved one. But it also, Dr. Hyrina liked to tell people, has healing powers.

Eventually, Adonis expanded to 20 rooms, with ultrasounds and interns. It opened new clinics. In 2012, the company launched a flagship maternity hospital on a hill about 20 miles west of Kyiv, the capital, that could see 300 patients a day. It started to accept private medical insurance.

International patients visited, drawn by less expensive rates for in vitro fertilization and cosmetic procedures. A laboratory worked with stem cells. Adonis also offered surrogacy to hopeful parents from outside Ukraine.

By early 2022, Adonis had 11 clinics in the Kyiv area. Dr. Hyrina, who kept her purplish black hair neatly styled and favored blouses with paisleys and beads, often described her mission as creating “a circle of help for women.”

In the days after Russian troops invaded that February, pushing toward Kyiv, the flagship hospital came under attack. A local soccer team arranged for buses to evacuate people. But some patients could not leave, including the women who were about to give birth. Staff members moved them to the basement, where they delivered babies in the darkness as shelling rang out above.

That clinic was eventually destroyed, with no fatalities.

Because of the war, most international patients stopped coming. Many pregnant women left the country to deliver their babies. Financial strains forced three more Adonis clinics to close.

But the original clinic, in a four-story building on the east bank of the Dnipro River, stayed open.

A Kind of Family

At a birthday party for the clinic’s medical director, the chief nurse, Tetiana Sharova, made the main toast, near a long narrow table laden with sliced meats and vegetables.

“We wish you success, mutual understanding, prosperity,” Ms. Sharova said, holding up a plastic glass with juice inside.

Every staff member at Adonis seemed to have a specific connection to the clinic, a role to play. Ms. Korzh, the matron, was the den mother, anticipating everyone’s needs. Ms. Sharova was the social leader, quick with a toast and a joke.

Indeed, the clinic had become a kind of family, celebrating holidays and special occasions. Doctors cared for the families of fellow employees, including Ms. Korzh’s daughter and her twins. In May, workers dressed in vyshyvankas — traditional embroidered outfits, once thought to ward off harm and bring good luck — to mark a national holiday.

Several staff members had bonded after escaping the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting against Russian-backed separatists had simmered since 2014. This gave them all something to talk about — the homes that they had been forced to leave, their family members who had lost everything, even their lives.

Ms. Sharova, for instance, had fled the same clinic in Makiivka, 10 miles from Donetsk, as Viktor Brahutsa, an ultrasound diagnostics doctor at Adonis who delighted in being the first person to tell a woman she was pregnant.

She and her husband, Ihor, moved into a studio apartment in a Soviet-style building in Kyiv that they joked reminded them of their first apartment in the east — boiling in the summer, freezing in the winter.

Ihor Sharov often drove his wife to Adonis. When the power was off because of blackouts, she carried her hair dryer and used the clinic’s electricity to dry her hair. She liked to dress smartly, despite having to change into blue scrubs at work.

On the first weekend of July, she listened to songs on her earbuds and danced around her apartment in a short red and blue caftan. She teased her husband for not being able to move like her.

Ms. Sharova and her husband had wanted to take a few days’ vacation to visit their son and his wife, southwest of Kyiv.

But Ms. Sharova could not find anyone to fill her shift. So on that Monday, with the electricity working, she dried her hair at home, put on a new red dress and left for work.

The Explosion

The air-raid sirens started about 10 a.m. Women climbed out of their examination stirrups. Patients got dressed. Everyone ran downstairs to the parking garage, which doubled as a bomb shelter.

As they huddled, they learned about the attack on the children’s hospital. Staff members called and texted family members, making sure everyone was OK. When the sirens stopped, employees and patients headed back to the clinic, but the mood was somber.

About 12:45 p.m., Dr. Hyrina’s son and daughter stopped by and asked her to come with them to the bank. She did not want to leave — she was already so far behind with work — but they insisted.

“We were in a hurry,” Dr. Hyrina recalled later. “I wanted to get back.”

At 12:57 p.m., the air-raid sirens went off again.

No one moved quickly. What were the odds of another attack? Ms. Korzh rested her elbows on a countertop, video footage shows. Ms. Sharova leaned against the wall, her glasses in her right hand, her phone in her left.

At 1:02 p.m., a large piece of missile debris fell from the sky, hitting just outside Dr. Hyrina’s office, blowing out the glass walls of some offices and setting off an explosion. All of the security cameras went dark. Dr. Kateryna Bondar, a dermatologist, was tossed onto the stairwell.

It’s not clear exactly what happened. Adonis does not appear to have been deliberately targeted, but instead was collateral damage from a missile intercepted far above, officials said.

After the dust cleared, after those who were conscious checked themselves for injuries, they stumbled to find the injured. One of those they found was Dr. Brahutsa, the ultrasound specialist. Two doctors started cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him, but he had lost both his legs.

Dr. Bondar picked herself up. She did not realize what had happened. Maybe a missile hit a taller building nearby, she thought. She ran down to the shelter and waited, maybe 15 minutes.

Then Dr. Bondar walked outside and saw that her workplace had been hit.

Another siren went off. More people were pulled from the clinic. Dr. Bondar was asked to help the assistant cashier, who had been sitting near Ms. Korzh and Ms. Sharova. A tourniquet had been tied above each of her elbows, to stanch the bleeding in her lower arms, and her clothes were the muddy color of gray dust mixed with blood. She asked for water. Her lip was cut. Dr. Bondar started wiping her face and realized the jaw was shattered.

“I think I’m dying,” the assistant cashier said.

“You’re not dying, don’t die!” Dr. Bondar told her. “Don’t you dare.”

The Aftermath

Seven people died at Adonis that day. Two patients. Dr. Brahutsa, 52, the ultrasound doctor. Dr. Poplavska, 38, the gynecologist who had recently given birth. Viktoriia Bondarenko, 51, the head cashier.

Ms. Korzh, 44, the new grandmother, did not make it either. Her husband identified her by her manicure: pink nails with white polka dots.

And then there was Ms. Sharova, 52. Her limp body, covered in blood, was placed on a small white trolley next to an ambulance, her hands hanging off the sides.

The five staff funerals were all on the same morning, three days after the explosion. Clinic employees went from one to the next. Dr. Brahutsa’s was first. At 8 a.m., his coffin was brought to the hospital and placed just outside the front doors before being buried at a family plot hours away.

The other funerals followed, a procession of grief. Ms. Korzh was laid to rest in her favorite vyshyvanka: blue and yellow, the colors of the flag.

Mr. Sharov gave much of his wife’s jewelry to their daughter, but traces of her remained everywhere. There was her Alive perfume on the dresser top, near his Eternity cologne. Her shoes from that day, and her bloodstained beige purse. He put those in his car trunk because he did not know what else to do.

Dzvinka Pinchuk and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting from Kyiv.