Geolocation
Airwars assessment
On February 25th 2022, Russian military allegedly exploded single cluster bomb at a children’s hospital and blood donation facility on Klochkovskaya Street in Kharkiv. One man was reportedly killed and two to three people, employees, including two women, were reportedly injured.
The attack was reported to have taken place approximately at 17.00, with the earliest recording from a car dashcam bearing a timestamp of 16:41. Local sources reported that there were seven or eight explosions near the centre. Airwars geolocation teams were able to identify nine explosions in the video and Imogen Piper from the investigations team found 25 craters.
The man who was reported killed, according to SQ “probably came to donate blood, he was standing on the street during the shelling” but he was described in other sources as a “passerby” and Suspilne Kharkiv on Telegram reported that the director of the centre said that there were two injured workers and one dead passerby, not a donor. SQ also identified the three wounded as employees of the center, two women and a man.
Airwars investigations reported that experts had identified that a single cluster bomb, dropped from a sufficiently high altitude could produce the impact sites in this case which spanned 350 metres. Multiple different weapons experts identified the cluster submunitions as Russian makes, either model 9N235 or 9N210, which can be delivered by two Russian rockets 220mm 9M27K Uragan; and the 300mm 9M55K Smerch, which carry 30 and 72 submunitions respectively. Russia has not commented officially on this incident.
This assessment has reference to ACLED code UKR53878 and Attacks on health dataset code 34136.
The incident occured at approximately 5:00 pm local time.
Geolocation notes
Reports of the incident mention a strike on a medical facility on Klochkivska street (Клочківська вулиця) in the city of Kharkiv (Харків). The generic coordinates for this facility are: 50.050967, 36.187010. Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.