By Eve Sampson
Three Red Cross workers were killed and two wounded Thursday when artillery fire struck a front-line aid distribution site in Ukraine, the organization said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross workers were preparing to distribute wood and coal briquettes in the village of Viroliubivka, in the Donetsk region, when they were hit, the group said in a statement.
The aid distribution had not yet started and no residents were harmed, the Red Cross said. The supplies were intended to prepare residents for the cold winter nights that are soon to come.
The Red Cross said that its teams worked in the region regularly and that its vehicles were clearly marked.
Images from after the attack show a white truck with a large red cross centered on the side engulfed in flames, its cab on fire and plumes of black smoke billowing upward in an arch.
The wounded staff members were taken to receive medical attention, and one was in serious condition, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said in a statement.
The attack took place amid increasing Russian bombardment around the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, roughly 35 miles away, as Russian troops pressed ahead with an offensive aimed at capturing the strategic city. Conditions in the city have deteriorated, and residents who remain are largely without water or electricity.
The Red Cross denounced the shelling without assigning specific blame.
“I condemn attacks on Red Cross personnel in the strongest terms,” the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, said in the statement. “It’s unconscionable that shelling would hit an aid distribution site. Our hearts are broken today as we mourn the loss of our colleagues and care for the injured.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine blamed Moscow for the deaths and called the attacks “another Russian war crime” in a statement paired with a photo of the Red Cross vehicle ablaze.
Last year was the deadliest on record for humanitarian aid workers, according to the United Nations, which reported 280 aid workers killed in 33 countries in 2023, a 137% increase over the year before.
For 2023 and the first half of 2024, the ICRC reported six staff members killed and 14 injured. That figure did not include Thursday’s casualties.
Pat Griffiths, a Red Cross spokesperson in Ukraine, was at a conference in the capital, Kyiv, when he received news of his colleagues’ deaths. Griffiths said he had recently traveled to the eastern Ukraine with the team whose members were killed.
“The feeling right now is grief,” he said. “And then because of our neutrality, all we can do is repeat the call, this urgent call, for all countries around the world, all parties to a conflict, to respect international humanitarian law, which is crystal clear that humanitarian workers and those who help, and ambulance drivers or first aid responders, are not targets.”
Asked if the group would cease operations in that area of Ukraine, another spokesperson, Jason Straziuso, said the Red Cross monitors the security situation carefully and planned to do an analysis of the attack.
“We know that our work helping people close to the front lines of conflict is inherently dangerous,” Straziuso said. “We know we cannot avoid all risks. When people think about the risk humanitarian workers face, we hope they also think about the risk residents who live close to the front lines of conflict face.”
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