Russia bombs Ukraine maternity ward leaving pregnant women cowering in basement | World | News

Pregnant women were forced to cower in a basement shelter as Russian drones hammered a maternity hospital in the northern city of Sumy, part of an overnight barrage that killed five civilians across Ukraine and damaged energy infrastructure. The attack struck the Sumy perinatal centre at about 5am local time on Monday.

Air raid sirens prompted an immediate evacuation to the underground shelter, where occupants waited amid exposed pipes and medical supplies. The drone damaged the roof and caused a fire, which firefighters contained without any injuries or fatalities. Iryna Voichuk shared a picture of the aftermath on X, commenting: “At the moment of the Russian strike on the maternity hospital in Sumy, there were 11 babies, 35 women, and 120 staff inside.” Fortunately nobody was injured.

The incident occurred during Russia‘s largest recorded drone and missile attack on Ukraine, with an estimated 496 Shahed-type drones and 53 ballistic and cruise missiles launched since Saturday evening.

Ukrainian air defences intercepted 439 drones and 39 missiles, but several strikes hit targets. The barrage affected nine regions, including power facilities that left thousands without electricity.

In Lviv Oblast, the western region faced its heaviest attack of the war, with 140 drones and 23 missiles killing four people – a couple, their 15-year-old child and another relative – in a residential building strike, and wounding several others.

Lviv Governor Maksym Kozytskyi described it as “the largest attack on the region since Russia began its full-scale invasion,” noting risks of hypothermia from power outages as winter approaches (stated 6 October 2025). A fifth death occurred at a train station in central Ukraine. Overall, the barrage injured 22 people.

Recent days have seen intensified Russian aerial operations. On Thursday, missiles struck Kharkiv, killing three people and damaging a school. On Saturday, cluster munitions hit markets in Donetsk, injuring civilians.

In Sumy Oblast, a drone attack on a family home earlier in the week killed a pregnant mother and her two young sons. Another drone strike on a Sumy railway station that day killed one person and wounded 30 passengers.

The Sumy strike continues a pattern of attacks on Ukrainian medical facilities that began with Russia‘s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. Days later on March 9, 2022, an airstrike hit Maternity Hospital No. 3 in Mariupol, killing three people including a child and wounding 17 others, many of them pregnant women evacuated on stretchers amid rubble, as featured on the front page on the Daily Express.

At the time, President Volodymyr Zelensky called the incident an “atrocity” and renewed calls for a no-fly zone. Russian officials claimed without offering any evidence that the site housed Azov regiment fighters; investigations by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch confirmed it was a functioning civilian maternity ward.

Since the invasion, Ukrainian prosecutors have investigated more than 150,000 alleged war crimes, including mass executions in Bucha in spring 2022 – where satellite imagery showed over 400 civilian bodies – and the exhumation of 450 bodies from mass graves in Izium that autumn.

A firebombing of Mariupol’s Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre, marked with “children” in large letters on the ground, killed at least 600 people sheltering there in March 2022. In liberated Kherson, basements revealed evidence of torture, rape and electrocution.

Reports from occupied Donetsk and Luhansk describe forced sterilisations of women, classified by Amnesty International as “reproductive terrorism.” The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Russia‘s Children’s Rights Commissioner over the deportation of more than one million Ukrainian children to Russia.

The World Health Organization has verified 1,350 attacks on healthcare facilities since 2022, resulting in hundreds of deaths among patients and staff. As of mid-2025, the United Nations reports over 11,000 civilian deaths and 20,000 injuries in the conflict.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stated on October 3 that the war “has entered an even more dangerous and deadly stage” – three and a half years after the invasion began – urging an end to the fighting.

Mr Zelensky described the latest attacks as further evidence of Russia‘s “aerial terror” and criticised the world’s “silence”. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced plans for additional sanctions on drone suppliers. NATO is considering increased air defence support for Ukraine.

Damage assessments in Sumy estimate costs in the millions of hryvnia, with staff planning to resume operations soon.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates the conflict has so far displaced six million Ukrainians, straining international aid as winter sets in.