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12 | MHCE - News www.mhce.us MARCH 2022 EDITION TO ADVERTISE contact Susan.Keller@mhce.us
WWW.MHCE.US Monthly Newsletter | 13 In the northern city of Chernihiv on Feb. 27, visual evidence shows impact to a central courtyard, near a pediatric dental clinic, which The Post confirmed via imagery on Google Earth. The attack left a crater in the ground, uprooted trees and blew the windows and debris from the surrounding buildings. The facility posted video of the aftermath to Facebook, showing blasted-out windows and debris scattered throughout the building. VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT MHCE.US Russian airstrikes hit homes and a hospital, including a maternity ward, in the northwest city of Zhytomyr on March 1, according to the Zhytomyr City Council, which shared video, first verified by third-party verification service Storyful and corroborated by The Post, showing first responders at the nighttime scene amid destroyed buildings and debris. Four people died in the attacks on the homes. Only windows were damaged at the maternity ward, according to regional council chairman Vladimir Fedorenko. Hospital infrastructure damaged In all of the examples reviewed by The Post, the hospitals' buildings were damaged. Verified images and videos illustrated the varied extent of the destruction. On Feb. 25, an oncology hospital in the southeastern city of Melitopol came under fire. Video, verified by Storyful and The Post, shows an explosion at the facility. Government officials and ACLED also confirmed the event. In the video, there is loud shelling, followed by a large boom and a bright flash emanating from inside one of the top floors of the hospital. Ukraine's Minister of Healthcare Viktor Liashko said an operating room was damaged, but no patients were hurt in the attack. On Feb. 27, Russian shelled the ear, nose and throat department building of a hospital in Volnovakha, a small city in the separatist Donetsk region, according to a Parliament of Ukraine Telegram channel. The Post verified photos posted online that showed damage to the outside of the building by comparing to source imagery on Google Earth. The deputy mayor of Izyum, a city south of Kharkiv, said the admissions office of a hospital was hit on March 8. Volodymyr Matsokin posted video to Facebook later that day showing part of the building destroyed, exposing part of the roof's internal structure with the facade caved inward and debris littering the area. "Patients climbed out from under the rubble as they could," he wrote on Facebook. Late in the evening of March 11, the head doctor of a cancer hospital in Mykolaiv posted photos and video, verified by The Post, of smashed windows and debris from an alleged Russian attack. He said many patients were being treated in the hospital at the time it came under attack, but no one was killed. The Mykolaiv regional governor, Vitaliy Kim, wrote on his Telegram channel that a Russian attack hit the hospital. "Assuming Russia does not take necessary steps - and it seems highly unlikely that it will — this evidence will be relevant to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor's investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine," Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, said in an email to The Post. The evidence gathered by The Post is "powerful circumstantial evidence" that would require a more detailed investigation, Hathaway explained. Motaparthy too noted in some cases it is difficult to parse from the visual imagery alone exactly what happened. "What is the extent of the damage? Were they targeting a military object next door or nearby, or were they targeting the hospital itself?" However, she noted that "attacks where there's clearly extensive damages and civilians were killed appear to violate the laws of war, and that militaries should avoid damaging hospitals, even if targeting military targets nearby."
