Today's top news: Ukraine

28 February 2022. A makeshift perinatal centre located in the basement of a medical complex in Saltivka, a residential district in Kharkiv, Ukraine. UNICEF

Ukraine

We are alarmed by the impact of hostilities on hospitals and health workers, amid shelling of areas along the front line.

Today, a hospital in the city of Kherson was damaged after being hit. And on Friday, at least two health workers were reportedly injured after an ambulance on call to help an injured civilian came under shelling in Beryslav town, in areas under Ukrainian control in the Kherson region.

Since the start of the full-scale war, health facilities on both sides of the front line in Ukraine have been destroyed and damaged. The World Health Organization says there have been 24 attacks on health care in the first three months of this year alone. In 2022, nearly 70 per cent of all attacks against health care worldwide happened in Ukraine.

We once again stress that health workers and facilities must be protected under international humanitarian law.

The UN and our partners in Ukraine are working to keep health services running. In recent months, humanitarian convoys have delivered medicine and medical supplies to several locations along the front line in the Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Last year, we and our partners provided health services to some 9.4 million people in Ukraine.