Russian drones systematically hunt Ukrainian medics, WHO warns of 3,118 healthcare attacks

Inna Lytvynenko was wearing her bright orange paramedic uniform when she drove into Kherson last June to treat a woman wounded in a Russian drone strike. An FPV drone—a small, camera-equipped aircraft piloted in real time—smashed into her ambulance. Seconds later, she heard the buzzing of another drone approaching fast. She grabbed her trauma bag and ran, screaming, knowing that stopping meant death. The drone chased her for roughly ten minutes before peeling away. Police picked her up, but the assault continued. Two more vehicles sent to evacuate the injured woman were hit by drones. It took a third police car, hours later, to finally get her to a hospital. Lytvynenko calls what happened to her "safari hunting"—a term that has entered the vocabulary of Ukrainian emergency workers to describe the deliberate, prolonged targeting of medical personnel and vehicles.

This is not isolated incident. The World Health Organization has documented 3,118 attacks on healthcare facilities and workers in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began in February 2022. That averages to two attacks per day. The pace is accelerating. In 2024, attacks on healthcare rose by 30 percent. Last year saw another 20 percent increase. The trend is expected to continue. Doctors Without Borders released a report concluding that Russia systematically and often deliberately targets Ukrainian medical facilities—not as collateral damage in larger military operations, but as a sustained feature of the war itself.

The distinction between missile strikes and drone strikes matters legally and morally. Missiles can be indiscriminate; their effects are blunt and wide. But FPV drones are different. A pilot sits somewhere with a live video feed from the drone's camera, watching the target in real time. When an FPV drone hits an ambulance, it is intentional. Lytvynenko was clearly marked as a medical worker. Her ambulance bore medical insignia. The drone operator saw her and chose to strike anyway. According to WHO data, ambulance attacks account for 20 percent of all healthcare strikes in Ukraine—a proportion too high to be accidental, suggesting instead a calculated strategy.

Russia also employs what military analysts call the "double-tap" tactic: striking the same location twice within minutes. The first strike creates casualties and draws first responders. The second strike targets those responders. During a recent Russian air assault on Kyiv, seven people died in such an attack—a police officer and a volunteer among them—after the second strike hit the same spot. Hospital director Olena Tymoshenko witnessed this pattern firsthand. Last month, Russian missiles struck her hospital in Kherson three times within minutes. "It cannot be an accident," she told the BBC. One doctor was killed. The building was severely damaged.

The Geneva Conventions explicitly protect hospitals and ambulances from attack. Russia and Ukraine have both pledged to respect these rules. Yet the WHO shares its facility coordinates with both Moscow and Kyiv specifically to prevent strikes—a precaution that suggests the protections are fragile. Last month alone, warehouses belonging to three UN agencies, including the WHO, were damaged in air strikes. The organization's representative in Ukraine, Dr. Jarno Habicht, calls the current situation "a new normality, which should not be the normality."

The human consequence unfolds slowly. Paramedics now monitor social media constantly, watching for threat alerts before each call. "Every time we take a patient to hospital, we just pray," Lytvynenko says. "These drones can appear from anywhere." In some areas, police are dispatched instead of ambulances because the risk is too high. Mobile clinics operated by health organizations have retreated steadily from the frontline. Two years ago, they could operate five to eight kilometers from active fighting. Now they will not venture closer than thirty kilometers—and that distance keeps growing as both sides develop drones with longer range. Robin Meldrum, the Doctors Without Borders coordinator in Ukraine, says his organization has stopped regular visits to approximately eighty villages near the front where it once provided healthcare. Ambulance services in Sloviansk, a major eastern city, have been paused entirely.

The people left in these conflict zones are predominantly elderly, many with chronic illnesses. They survive the initial strikes and shelling only to face a slower death—cut off from medication, from check-ups, from the basic healthcare that keeps them alive. The war is not just killing them directly. It is systematically dismantling the infrastructure that sustains life in the places where they remain. "We don't feel that the rules of war are being respected," Meldrum says. The question now is whether that feeling will change, or whether the targeting of medical workers and facilities will continue to deepen as the conflict grinds on.