Russian Missile Attack on Ukraine’s Largest Hospital Complicates Treatment of Kids With Cancer

File photo: A general view shows a shopping mall heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine December 29, 2023. (Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk region/Handout via Reuters)
File photo: A general view shows a shopping mall heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine December 29, 2023. (Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk region/Handout via Reuters)
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Russian Missile Attack on Ukraine’s Largest Hospital Complicates Treatment of Kids With Cancer

File photo: A general view shows a shopping mall heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine December 29, 2023. (Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk region/Handout via Reuters)
File photo: A general view shows a shopping mall heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine December 29, 2023. (Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk region/Handout via Reuters)

The National Cancer Institute in Kyiv was busier than usual after a Russian missile struck Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital this week, forcing the evacuation of dozens of its young patients battling cancer.
Russia’s heaviest bombardment of the Ukrainian capital in four months severely damaged Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital on Monday, terrorizing families and severely impacting their children already battling life-threatening diseases, The Associated Press said.
Now, some families face a dilemma of where to continue their children's treatment.
Oksana Halak only learned about her 2-year-old son Dmytro’s diagnosis — acute lymphoblastic leukemia — at the beginning of June. She immediately decided to have him treated at Okhmatdyt, “because it is one of the best hospitals in Europe.”
She and Dmytro were in the hospital for his treatment when sirens blared across the city. They couldn’t run to the shelter as the little boy was on an IV. “It is vitally important not to interrupt these IVs,” Halak said.
After the first explosions, nurses helped move them to another room without windows, which was safer.
“We felt a powerful blast wave. We felt the room shaking and the lights went out,” she recalled. “We understood that it was nearby, but we didn’t think it was at Okhmatdyt.”
Shortly after that, they were evacuated to the National Cancer Institute, and now Dmytro is one of 31 patients who, amid a difficult fight with cancer, have to adapt to a new hospital. With their arrival, the number of children being treated for cancer there has doubled.
Dmytro and the other patients were offered evacuation to hospitals abroad, and Halak wants his further treatment to be in Germany.
“We understand that with our situation, we cannot receive the help we should be getting, and we are forced to apply for evacuation abroad,” she said.
Other hospitals in the city that took in children for treatment faced a similar overcrowding situation after the shutdown of Okhmatdyt, where hundreds of children were being treated at the time of the attack.
“The destroyed Okhmatdyt is the pain of the entire nation,” said the director general of the National Cancer Institute, Olena Yefimenko.
Almost immediately after the attack, messages began circulating on social media networks to raise money for the hospital's restoration. Many parents whose children were treated there wrote messages of gratitude, saying their children survived due to the hospital's care despite difficult diagnoses. In just three days, Ukrainians and private businesses raised more than $7.3 million through the national fundraising platform UNITED24.
Work to rebuild the hospital is already underway. Okhmatdyt doctors balance their duties treating their young evacuated patients while working to get the children's hospital reopened. But even with resources and determination, that may take months.
Even so, Yuliia Vasylenko has already decided that her 11-year-old son, Denys, will remain in Kyiv for his cancer treatment.
The day of the attack the boy, diagnosed with multiple spinal cord tumors, was supposed to start chemotherapy. The strike delayed his treatment indefinitely, and Denys has to undergo additional examinations and tests, his mother said.
Denys was very scared during the strike, said his mother as she wheeled him around the National Cancer Institute in a wheelchair.
“The last days felt like an eternity," she said. Only now are they slowly recovering from the stress.
“If we go somewhere, with our diagnosis, we would have to retake all the tests from the beginning,” she said, adding that this could take three to four months.
“And we don’t know if we have that time,” she said.



US Judge Orders Trump Administration to Reinstate Thousands of Fired Workers

US President Donald Trump speaks during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 13 March 2025. (EPA)
US President Donald Trump speaks during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 13 March 2025. (EPA)
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US Judge Orders Trump Administration to Reinstate Thousands of Fired Workers

US President Donald Trump speaks during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 13 March 2025. (EPA)
US President Donald Trump speaks during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 13 March 2025. (EPA)

A California federal judge on Thursday ordered six US agencies to reinstate thousands of recently-hired employees who lost their jobs as part of President Donald Trump's purge of the federal workforce.

The ruling by US District Judge William Alsup during a hearing in San Francisco is the most significant blow yet to the effort by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Government agencies are facing a Thursday deadline to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.

Alsup's ruling applies to probationary employees at the US Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.

The judge said the US Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for federal agencies, had improperly ordered those agencies to fire workers en masse even though it lacked the power to do so.

“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” said Alsup, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees. They have fewer job protections than other government workers but in general can only be fired for performance issues.

Alsup ordered the agencies to reinstate workers who were fired over the last few weeks, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by unions, nonprofit groups, and the state of Washington.

He did not order the 16 other agencies named in the lawsuit to reinstate workers, but said he would promptly issue a written decision that could expand on Thursday's ruling.

A Veterans Affairs spokesperson declined to comment. A Department of Interior spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on litigation over personnel matters.

The White House and the other agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The plaintiffs include the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers. The union's president, Everett Kelley, in a statement said the decision was an important victory against "an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public."

25,000 WORKERS

Alsup last month had temporarily blocked OPM from ordering agencies to fire probationary employees, but declined at the time to require that fired workers get their jobs back. The plaintiffs subsequently amended their lawsuit to include the agencies that fired probationary workers.

About 25,000 workers across the US government had been fired as of March 5, according to a Reuters tally, and another 75,000 have taken a buyout. The Trump administration has not released statistics on the firings, and it was not immediately clear how many employees could be affected by Thursday's decision.

In the lawsuit before Alsup, the plaintiffs claim the mass firings were unlawful because they were ordered by OPM rather than left to the discretion of individual agencies.

OPM has maintained that it merely asked agencies in a January 20 memo to identify probationary workers and decide which ones were not "mission critical" and could be fired, and did not order them to terminate anyone.

The agency on March 4 revised that memo, adding that it was not directing agencies to take any specific actions with respect to probationary employees.

OPM has pointed to the updated memo and to press releases by agencies as proof that it had no control over agencies' decisions.

Alsup on Thursday told the US Department of Justice lawyer representing OPM, Kelsey Helland, that he did not believe that was true, and scolded the government for not presenting OPM's acting director, Charles Ezell, to testify at the hearing.

“I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years and I know how we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me get at the truth. You’re giving me press releases, sham documents,” Alsup said.

Helland said it was common for presidential administrations to prevent high-ranking agency officials from testifying in court, and that the information provided by OPM in court filings was enough to prove that it never ordered agencies to terminate workers.

Along with the lawsuit in California, several other challenges to the mass firings have been filed, including cases by 20 Democrat-led states and a proposed class action by a group of fired workers.

The Merit Systems Protection Board, which reviews federal employees' appeals when they are fired, earlier this month ordered the Agriculture Department to reinstate nearly 6,000 probationary workers at least temporarily.