Election night in America, ballistic missiles in Kharkiv, and 200 patients moved before dawn

On Monday evening President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence knew Russia was preparing “a new massive strike”, mainly on energy and logistics². He suggested the Kremlin was counting on the world’s attention being on Tuesday’s US elections². Overnight, the strike came.

The worst-documented damage so far is in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, about 30 kilometres from the Russian border¹. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city was hit with ballistic missiles and guided aerial bombs. One strike landed on a medical facility in the Nemyshlianskyi district, in a section linking its buildings¹. By early morning 46 people were reported injured, up from four in the first reports^1,2. More than 1,000 windows were broken across the facility and nearby flats, and about 200 patients were being moved to other hospitals¹.

Elsewhere, the regional head in Dnipropetrovsk, Oleksandr Hanzha, reported strikes on critical infrastructure in Dnipro and the Kryvyi Rih district at about 03:10 CET². Explosions were heard in Vinnytsia region at about 02:15 CET². Focus.ua said the targets again appeared to include the energy plants that heat millions of homes². It also passed on monitoring-channel reports of Iskander-M, North Korean-made KN-23 and Zircon missiles, and was careful to say that these counts “need confirmation by official sources”². This desk holds to the same rule. The verified facts this morning are a damaged hospital, injured people and an evacuation.

Look at the dull part of that list. Moving 200 patients in the dark, with glass on the floor, needs ambulances, receiving wards with free beds and staff who know the drill. That is the institution doing its work under fire. Kharkiv has lived with missile, drone and bomb attacks for the whole of the full-scale war, and it shows¹.

For you, in Berlin, the useful habit this morning is the same as for the American count. Wait for the official tally, and treat the first numbers as provisional. Here, unlike in a ballot count, every revision is a person.