KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The sky was crystal clear as Oksana Femeniuk took her daughter to Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital for routine dialysis. Around 10 a.m, air-raid sirens blared .
Sixteen-year old Solomiia was undergoing the treatment that required her to sit still for up to five hours and could not be interrupted. Her mother had to flee to the hospital's basement shelter without her. Hurtling toward them at 700-800 kilometers (435-497 miles) per hour was a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile, according to Ukraine’s security service, the United Nations and open-source investigators.
Using painstaking trial and error, Russia has modified the weapon over the last year to defeat Ukraine’s air defense systems by flying at low altititude and hugging terrain, according to military analysts. Minutes later the world turned black. Neither the patient nor her mother would remember the moment the missile struck.
But they remember the chaos that ensued after regaining consciousness: Femeniuk thought she would choke from the fumes. Solomiia woke to find the ceiling crumpled over her small body. In an operating room in the next building, pediatric surgeon Oleh Holubchenko had been preparing to operate on an infant with a congenital facial defect.
Covered in shrapnel wounds, he realized that the blast wave had catapulted him to the other side of the operating room. The toll of Russia’s heaviest bombardment of Kyiv in almost four months — one of the deadliest of the war — sh.
