Russian Armed Forces strike Kharkiv multiple times, leaving almost 30 civilians injured
Russian forces launched about ten attacks on the northeastern Ukrainian City of Kharkiv on the morning of September 1, 2024.
The Prosecutor’s Office stated that Kharkiv was attacked by ballistic missiles launched from Russian territory. Eight missiles struck three different districts of the city.
Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, reported damage to civilian infrastructure and casualties. More than 40 civilians were injured, including five children. People may still be trapped under the rubble.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov stated that several households and a supermarket caught fire. While responding to the attack, several medical personnel were injured. Terekhov later reported that the attacks injured 22 people in Kharkiv’s Saltivskyi district and six in the Nemyshlianskyi district, including a 6-year-old child who suffered an acute stress reaction.
The Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration later added that the damaged infrastructure included a shopping centre, a sports facility, and residential buildings.
On September 1, Russians attacked the village of Slatyne in the Kharkiv Oblast twice during the night, injuring six people, including a pregnant woman. Syniehubov added that as a result of the attack, a car and a house caught fire.
The National Police of Ukraine (NPU) in the Kharkiv Oblast reported one of its captains – Oleksandr Popovych – died in hospital on August 31, 2024, due to severe shrapnel injuries sustained during a Russian drone attack. A Russian First-Person View drone struck a police car carrying three officers in the City of Kupiansk at around 19:30 on Saturday, August 31.
Oleksandr PopovychThe attack left all three officers with shrapnel wounds, and medics transported them to the hospital. Despite doctors’ efforts, one officer succumbed to his injuries.
The NPU reported that Oleksandr, 44, had served in the police for about 20 years. During Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he joined a humanitarian mission in one of the most dangerous districts of the Kharkiv Oblast.
On September 3, Syniehubov reported that Yevhen Yurko, a 21-year-old paramedic Yevhen Yurko died in a Kharkiv hospital from severe injuries sustained while providing assistance to victims of an earlier attack.
Yevhen YurkoAccording to volunteer Natalia Popova, Yurko had worked at the Kharkiv Regional Center for Emergency Medical Care and Disaster Medicine. He and his team arrived at the scene minutes after the initial shelling to provide aid to the injured.
Kharkiv National Medical University, where Yevhen was a fifth-year student, elaborated that he had responded to a call at a shopping center near the “Akademika Pavlova” metro station. However, during a subsequent missile strike, a rocket fragment pierced his head. Emergency services rushed him to the hospital in critical condition.
Kharkiv residents raised nearly half a million hryvnias in an attempt to save the medic’s life. However, his injuries proved fatal.
On August 30, 2024, Russian bombardment killed seven civilians and injured 77 in Kharkiv.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted to the new attack on Kharkiv.
“As of now, there are over 30 wounded. All necessary forces have been deployed for the rescue operation. But to stop this terror, all necessary global forces must be mobilised. What’s required isn’t extraordinary effort, but the sufficient courage of leaders – the courage to give Ukraine everything it needs to defend itself,” he wrote on X.
Previously, Zelenskyy called on all Ukraine’s international partners to allow it to hit targets inside Russia to prevent such attacks. His office said Moscow’s forces had fired more than 400 drones and missiles at Ukraine over the past week.
The UN pointed out that a large-scale coordinated attack launched by the Russian Armed Forces across Ukraine on July 8, 2024, killed at least 43 civilians, including 5 children, and injured 147, including 7 children, in Kyiv City, Dnipro City, Kryvyi Rih (Dnipropetrovsk region) and Kyiv region.
One missile in the 8 July attack also struck a hospital complex in Kyiv city, destroying the toxicology department of the Okhmatdyt National Children’s Hospital and significantly damaging the Center for Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.
In June and July, the most intensive offensive military operations by the Russian Armed Forces shifted from the northern Kharkiv region to the Donetsk region, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine noted. As a result, verified civilian casualties in the Donetsk region increased from 125 civilians killed or injured in May to 224 in June and 269 in July 2024.
The vast majority of civilian casualties (90%) and damage to educational and health facilities (86%) continued to occur in Government-controlled territory.
As for now, it is impossible to determine the exact number of all casualties, as Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and the representatives of the ICC have no access to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
