What shelling of hospitals meant for civilian life by 1 February 2023
Reports from the last days of January 2023 showed how civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities, featured in accounts of the war.
What did the war look like for civilians as of 1 February 2023? Reports from the preceding days pointed to damage to the everyday institutions on which public life depends, hospitals among them.
On 29 January 2023, Russian forces shelled the city of Kherson, according to reports at the time. Three people were killed and six others injured. A hospital, a school and a bus station were damaged. Together, those sites cover health care, education and transport, the services residents rely on daily.
A day earlier, on 28 January 2023, Russia claimed that a Ukrainian HIMARS missile strike on a hospital in Novoaidar, Luhansk Oblast, had killed 14 people and injured 24 others, including patients and medical staff. The claim came from Russia, and the reports supplied no confirmation of it.
The two accounts are different in kind: one describes damage in a city, the other a contested claim from a Russian source. Both, however, placed hospitals at the centre of reporting from the front-line regions in the final days before 1 February 2023, and both involved casualties among people who were not combatants or, in the Novoaidar claim, among patients and medical staff.
