all the water in the world
a diary of a strike, an aftermath, and a community coming together
10:25 a.m.
You’re in your kitchen, eating breakfast and watching YouTube videos on your laptop, when the first explosions shake the sky. Two of them, close together. A bad sign. You hadn’t noticed the air alert was active. Come to think of it, now you remember seeing a notification pop up on your phone, but you must have dismissed it by reflex without pausing to check what it was.
There’s no time now to go to shelter. The attack is already underway. The basement of your 19th Century apartment building is dank and seems like a death trap, and leaving the safety of the roof to run to the metro down the street would probably be a mistake. So you grab your phone and slip on your sandals, in case you have to run, and then you hunker down in your front doorway, far away from the windows.
The next explosions come in intermittent bursts. Five, eight, a dozen. Some you know to be air defence interceptions, being dull and distant. The loudest ones though, those could be hits. One cracks so loudly over the city you flinch, and your heart flips. “Feels bad,” you think to yourself, maybe the worst such attack in four months. But you know what to do to stay calm. You breathe, that’s all. Breath is a reminder that you really are fine right now. You’re fine, just helpless. The best way to pass the time is to surrender to that fact. You’re fine, you’re breathing, and there’s nothing else you can do.
After long, tense minutes, there is silence. The attack monitoring channels report the Kyiv region is “clean” of aerial threats. You let out a breath of relief and scroll Twitter to learn about any damage. There were seven hits in the city. A lot got through. A very bad sign. This will embolden the attackers, you think. They may try again soon.
One Kh-101 cruise missile struck a children’s hospital less than three kilometres from your apartment. Okhmatdyt, it’s called. The first photos to emerge are terrifying: a surgeon, covered in blood. Cancer-stricken kids brought to safety outside, comforted by their parents, still hooked to their IVs.
You take a shower, call a cab, and get it to drop you a couple blocks from the hospital.
— — —
11:55 a.m.
The hospital compound is situated in a nice part of Kyiv. The streets are lined with tall apartments and trendy restaurants, and shaded by the capital’s thick canopy of trees. You look up to find tendrils of smoke trailing over the top of a high-rise, and follow it towards the source, weaving your way down the sidewalk past parents out strolling with their kids. It’s been just 90 minutes since the missile hit.
The wide, arterial street that runs past the hospital is jammed with ambulances and fire trucks and police. Long columns of soldiers march through the gates to the main hospital compound, heading to help rescue victims from the debris.
All around these gates, and on the other side of the street, civilians cluster, staring up at the hospital, raising their phones to take photos. From here, all you can see are the upper floors of the hospital’s tallest building, all the windows on one side blown out, panels of cladding ripped from its face by the force of the blast. You skirt around the block, searching for a better vantage.
On the hospital’s south flank, an old Soviet apartment building stands damaged, many of its windows blown out. A layer of shattered glass blankets the pavement, crunching under your feet. Residents comb the parking lot, sweeping it into piles with brooms or just the boughs of trees. On the boulevard nearby, a young woman squats in the grass, her arm resting on a pet carrier that holds a silken-furred white cat.
Nearby, four men climb the crumbling retaining wall that divides the apartment block from the hospital complex, trying to get a peek of the rescue effort inside. From below the wall, you can see the smashed and collapsed corner of a building — reportedly the hospital’s toxicology department — which was the epicentre of the strike.
A few minutes later, police come and usher the men away, back to where civilians are squeezed in tight along the main street, gazing up at the damage, seized by the desire to bear witness to what happened here, on this awful morning in Kyiv.
The smell of sweat, the weight of heat, the sound of running engines. The whispers of murmured condemnation and the way, every so often, some of the foreigners mingling in the crowd sigh and say one word to each other, or no-one in particular.
“Motherfuckers.”
— — —
12:57 p.m.
The air siren wails again, mingling with the cry of an ambulance racing away from the scene. Outside the hospital, a nervous ripple moves through the crowd. This is not the typical response. Normally, people in Kyiv don’t react much to sirens anymore: they’ve become too frequent, too familiar. And most don’t result in an attack.
But everyone knows about the so-called “double tap” strategy Russia has employed in both Syria and Ukraine, where a second strike is delivered after emergency crews get to a site. And everyone’s nerves are still raw from the morning.
Suddenly, there is an explosion over Kyiv. Not close, but loud.
A gasp rises from the crowd, and now everyone is dashing to the pedestrian underpass that runs under the street, perhaps 150 people squeezing in like sardines. There are all types together: nurses, civilians, soldiers. There is fear, but no panic. A man wraps his arms around his girlfriend and holds her face to his chest, swaying gently for comfort. Firefighters rest on the steps, in the sun, too tired to move under cover.
A police woman threads through the crowd, holding bottled water over her head.
“Potribna voda?” Need water?
A mother reaches out and takes a bottle for her toddler son, carefully pouring sips into his mouth.
It’s strange, you will tell your friends later. You’ve been in dodgier situations since you came to Ukraine, and dodgier places. But this is the first time you’ve felt really scared. It’s the effect of being around other frightened people, you realize. When you were out near Chasiv Yar with the American medic, everyone around you was calm. But here, in the underpass, you can feel the tension of a hundred clenching hearts.
After about seven minutes in the underpass, the monitoring channels report there is no more threat, and in an instant people rush up to the street for fresh air. The alarm will blare again soon, but next time, nobody reacts quite as much.
— — —
2:51 p.m.
There are many things Ukrainians do very well, but chief among them is spontaneous lateral self-organizing. It’s been less than five hours since the strike, and the crowd at the hospital has swelled into a sea of helpers. Thousands of people are here now, and more keep coming, bringing bottles of water and boxes of snacks for the rescuers.
The scene here is chaotic, but controlled. On one side of the gate, men hold up hastily-scrawled cardboard signs directing visitors where to hand over donated liky, medicine, and yizha, food. On the other side, another set of volunteers are collecting the bottled water. A human chain has formed, leading into the hospital complex, passing bags of donated aid from one set of hands to another.
All of this emerged organically, you realize. There is no formalized structure. People just came and fell into place beside police and official crews. Some naturally stepped up as leaders, others slipped into their roles as basic labour. You stand in awe, as you take stock of the activity humming all around the hospital’s flanks.
The afternoon sun is relentless. The air is blistering hot. Bottles of water pile up into rugged mountain ranges of plastic, wrapping clear around the block. There must be tens, even hundreds of thousands of bottles, and still more keep coming, as a steady flow of civilians walks up carrying a couple of bottles, a bag full of them, or an entire pallet. Grocery stores made their water dispensing machines free, so anyone can fill up plastic jugs and take them to the site.
There’s so much water here, you wonder how there’s any left in Kyiv at all. Somewhere on the city’s social media channels, the message goes out: okay, thanks everyone, but we don’t need anymore water now.
You meet your friend Cory at a grocery store just up the street. He came to bring you a power bank for your dying phone. Together, you march back towards the hospital site, where he shoulders his backpack and walks straight past the police at the gates, going to join the thousand emergency workers and civilians clearing debris.
You follow him inside the compound.
— — —
3:45 p.m.
It seems strange, in a way, that the scene inside the hospital compound is calmer than on the street, but it is. It’s been just over five hours since the attack, and the clean-up effort is already in full swing.
Cory disappears into the hospital to join the volunteer effort, joining the steady flow of people that walk past a cordon of soldiers and a box of work gloves. The volunteers fit every description. There are stout middle-aged men, and skinny teen girls. Doctors are helping clear rubble, as are nurses, and even a veteran with a prosthetic leg.
Kyiv has united today, you think. Not just Kyiv. People. This is not only about a city. It’s about the worst and best of people, converged on this place, on this day. Cruelty and compassion. Division and cooperation. The violence that struck the site is over now; it’s the hope that remains.
The shady park at the complex’s heart is flanked by medical equipment salvaged from the debris: there’s a hyperbaric chamber. A child’s hospital bed bearing a heart-shaped sticker in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Medical carts and boxes of syringes.
Soldiers and firefighters lie in the grass under the trees, smoking and resting after a long day in the heat. One of the firefighters wears a jacket with a faded Canadian flag patch, likely donated from Edmonton. Volunteers move around the complex, offering water, pizza, sandwiches, and fruit to everyone they see.
Behind the destroyed toxicology building, a doctor in a lab coat stands beside a row of low tables. Hospital staff trickle up every few minutes bringing medical supplies from the building: a tray of glass vials, a box of syringes. The doctor inspects each delivery, before adding them to the stack growing behind her.
In one of the hospital buildings, less-damaged in the blast, a doctor comes to stand in front of an open first-floor window. He remains there for a few minutes, gazing out at the park stone-still and unmoving, with an impenetrable look on his face. You wonder what he is thinking. You wonder what he thought, when the blast ripped through this building. Even in war, hospitals are supposed to be safe.
The heavy equipment has already arrived. Dump trucks crawl out of the site, hauling loads of smashed concrete. Acrid smoke wafts over the site. You notice that the tip of one tree's branch is still smouldering, hours after it was struck by flaming debris.
Your friend Cory emerges from the building. The work is going fast, he says. There are so many people working, so many volunteers and official emergency crews, that they had about 30 people for each damaged room, and could clear it of debris in just five minutes. Right now, anyway, more hands don’t seem needed.
You leave the site together, walking a few blocks away to call a cab. It drops you off at your favourite neighbourhood dive bar. You order a Diet Coke and a bowl of chili, and for the next hour, you and your friend sit in near-total silence. Just thinking.
Two people were killed in the hospital strike, and about 50 injured. The hospital had evacuated many patients and staff to the basement when the air strike alarm rang, so casualties weren’t as horrific as they might have been. Two days later, a boy who was in ICU there dies in another hospital, where he was transferred.
Within 24 hours, individual donations, government pledges and corporate fundraisers gather millions of dollars to restore the hospital.
It was a bad day in Kyiv. It was also the most beautiful day you’ve ever seen. You hold onto the latter for dear life.