I recall a video of a young Syrian girl sincerely laughing at airstrikes. Her father said there was nothing to be scared of, that it’s just a game. As the bombs exploded, the two of them laughed.
That’s exactly how we were laughing on July 8. Sitting in the bathroom of our Kyiv apartment with my then 5-year-old son, Tim, and our dog (who starts to howl hysterically every time the air raid alarm goes off in the city), we burst into laughter.
Another boom was particularly loud.
My son knows far too much to believe that airstrikes are a game. His reactions are closer to: “Another Russian rocket downed, we won.” We survived once more, and the Russians just wasted dozens of millions of dollars trying to kill us, only to have some scrap metal fall to the ground. Ha-ha.
Tim made up a cheerful song, lauding our air defenses as the best. Still sitting in the bathroom, I shared our version of laughing through the bombs on social media.
Only to regret it when I saw the news.
The air defenses hadn’t succeeded. A Russian cruise missile struck Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, causing massive damage, killing and injuring many people.
“I immediately found myself on the floor,” said Oleg Golubchenko, a surgeon who was operating on a child at the moment of the strike. “When I came to my senses, I realized everything around me was in ruins. I was injured too. I felt warmth all over my body and saw that I was bleeding, but my arms and legs were functioning, and I was breathing. I crawled a little and saw that the child was okay, although the equipment was destroyed.”
The godmother of a girl who was undergoing chemotherapy, one of the 627 children in the hospital that day, recounted that: “During the evacuation it was complete chaos. We were running down the stairs, where there was blood. Children with cancer, who had no contact with the outside world were forced to crowd together with everyone else in the basement.”
According to our Amnesty International research, there was no evidence of any military presence in the hospital. Given the large size of the complex, it is highly unlikely that the cruise missile — confirmed to have been a highly accurate Kh-101 stealth missile — was aimed at a different target and missed. Instead the evidence suggests that this was a direct attack against civilians and a protected civilian object, which killed and injured civilians, and so constituted a war crime.
This is far from the only case. Many organizations documenting civilian casualties in Ukraine reported a significant increase in Russian attacks in 2024. Children are particularly at risk for many reasons — some as obvious as the fact that they cannot afford to lose as much blood as adults.
There was an attack on a sports club in the Kharkiv region, where children, as one boy told us, were doing karate. There was another attack in Lviv on September 4, where seven people were killed, including four members of one family — a mother and three daughters, aged 21, 18, and six
When the air raid siren sounded that morning, their father, Yaroslav Bazylevych, knew exactly what to do. He told Amnesty International: “We woke up all the children, and I carried the youngest in my arms because she was sleeping. We hid in the corridor at the entrance to the kitchen, following to the ‘two-wall rule’, and waited for the alarm to end.
“My wife panicked a little, and after the first explosion on Brativ Mikhnovskikh Street, she took all the children and went down to the stairwell with them; everyone thought it was the safest place.”
The father was still inside the apartment from where he heard his wife’s last words. “Come downstairs,” she said, and then another missile hit. The top floor of the building was destroyed. The stairwell sheltering seven civilians, including the Bazylevychs, collapsed around them. They were all killed.
As my colleagues and I speak to people for Amnesty research, we cannot include emotions. No military presence, we say. Deliberate targeting, we say. War crimes, we say.
We cannot be emotional. International humanitarian law is cold and distant, which is hard to get used to.
But these lines you are reading are not a research report, and I can say: Yaroslav Bazylevych, whose entire family was killed, said to my colleague Olena Kozachenko: “I want to tell the international community that they should finally wake up and stop the advance of this swamp. It’s not only coming for us, but for them as well.”
So banal. So many times already said. So true. Olena said it was a very difficult interview. Right now, they’re all difficult and painful. We’ve gotten used to it. And to laughing at the explosions, that too.
We can laugh, why can’t we? And so we do — in those brief moments when we don’t yet know who died. When we still aren‘t sure if the next missile will hit us.
Lera Burlakova is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary ‘Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Media Officer for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team. She was previously a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.)
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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