Elizabeth Cohen 35:00
We're gonna talk very fast, because we have to get moving even before he sits down. But thank you, Mr. Secretary Kate, that was a tremendous session. Thank you so much. Pablo, you arrived from the Ukraine to here just a few days ago? Yeah. You took a bus to the border with Poland, walked across the border. And then you're going back to the Ukraine tomorrow? Yeah. Can you tell us all we've all read about it? But you've been there the whole time? Can you tell us what is the situation there?
Pavlo Kovtoniuk 35:39
Well, you know, Elizabeth, I meant on my way here to talk about one thing. And the thing is that some really evil things are happening in the world. And that is that health is not being a victim to war, which is happening in my country. But health is also being the weapon to war.
And this is what I observe with my own eyes. And this is what I want to tell you about today. If you give me a couple of minutes, I will, I will tell the story about that. Actually, I have never imagined that I will be talking about the things. By background, I'm Health Economist. And the most exciting part of my career was working in the Minister of Health, I was a deputy minister of health, during a very historical times in the health care in my country, we were when implementing the largest transform ation in Europe, indicates in healthcare sector, we implemented the single payer universal health care in Ukraine in 2017. The thing which America is struggling to have right, for many years, so we succeeded. And then back in it was in 2017, and the health care was growing. And it was the boom of development of the healthcare and communities began to invest in, in health and to build nice clinics, like like this one on the screen, which I see here, but probably Yeah, that's it. That's a interesting place.
I want to tell you a short story about this place. This is a primary care clinic near Kyiv, kind of 30 miles from Keefe. The town is called ma Cardiff. And that was built in 2018. As a part of this reform, the community invested their money, they build this place, the community, this community didn't have the, the cleaning before that, and there was a huge thing. And I visited this place as a deputy minister of health when they built it. And that was a huge story, people celebrate it to carry it later, it became the mass vaccination center, and you can see this sign, it says, Get your vaccine here. So that was the community vaccination Center during the COVID pandemic. And, and that was great times. And then I left the ministry in 2019. And then I worked for World Health Organization for for some time. And then I started my own NGO, together with my colleagues, the Ukrainian health Healthcare Center to promote reforms.
Further in country, we were working with communities like this in helping them to build their health infrastructure. But then the war began on February 24. This year why it's, you know, unexpectedly for many, I remember this day very well. I got off actually 5am in the morning, hitting huge explosions, and then another explosion and then another in Kiev. And then next day, I just brought my family out of the city into safety. And most of my team in the center did the same. And then we started to look at what was happening. And as we started to see that as Russian troops were advancing, they were ruthlessly and brutally destroying the civilian infrastructure and livelihoods. It was not only military thing, they could have been destroying the civilian infrastructure and they can be destroying healthcare.
And I assembled a part of my team who were at the contact. They of course, it was remotely they were all across the Europe and Ukraine. I was in Ukraine. And we started to document those episodes of attacks on health facilities just intuitively. But very soon, that became our more systemic work. And you figure out the really impressively massive scale of what was happening.
In the first 100 Days of War, there was 170 hospitals and primary care centers being bombed very severely. That is one or two every day. And within those 100 days, there was a period of three weeks, from March one to march 21 When the intensity of attacks was four to five hospitals every day. And then we understood one thing, that these attacks is not a coincidence. It's not that it is a collateral damage, you know, of the military are fighting. And of course, there is some damage to civilian infrastructure. Now, we understood that this is something bigger, and this is something more sinister. And they began to investigate to dig down into that. And once Russian troops retreated from Kiev , my family came back immediately to Kiev, we decided that we need to be together with our city to be at home, even though it was very difficult to be there at that time. And I began to deep dive into this hospital attacks, and I began to visit sites of those attacks. And on the news, I got to know that this clinic in Makati was one of the clinics under attack. And I jumped in my car and drove onto the place. And this is what I saw there. And the sign was the only thing which remained. And I also made the clip, a short clip for you guys, maybe we'll be able to, to show you at the place that was just on the rubble over there. And the sign vaccinate here and I want to show you one more one more thing I brought with me from this place this this I found here on among the rubble This is a part of the shrapnel This is a particle of the mortar shell with with which the place was want and you can you can see that this is quite an if you want
Elizabeth Cohen 42:46
It's very heavy, it's heavy thing
Pavlo Kovtoniuk 42:50
And how it works. So when the bomb hits the place dozens of these pieces hundreds of pieces of this just flow in all directions that acute with a huge force and they just break everything to the ground and even was don't protect from this this breaks the wall you read two walls to be protected from from this particles and being at this place in Makati if and there is again the photo my team was able to investigate what happened. And he found out that it was attacked by the by the mortar fire do we know what the mortar is? I have to know unfortunately, I also never knew about that before February embarrassed you can you can show it on the on the screen please. The mortar is a kind of the tube like this, which stands on the ground at the angle. And then there is three to four people soldiers operating the mortar and then had a shell like this. And they put it into the mortar and close to yours and then and then the other guy called the spotter, he looks at the target whether a target is hit or not. And if it's not, he says one step correction and the guy at the mortar makes the adjustment and the end goal then another and they make another shot another shell is being fired and then it is 10 meter step forward. And then the spotter says again whether it was there or not and then make another correction. And we could see on the screen and you can see the holes from this mortar shell and we could see the direction we could detect the angle of the attack and we walked at along the line of this of this attack, and they found another shell, another hole from the shell, and then another one, and then another one, and then another one for holes outside the clinic.
And then he walked one mile, which is the medium range of the mortar attack one mile from the clinic, and we found actually their actual place from which it was fired. And we reconstructed the whole story that those people did it on purpose. There were at least four of them. One of them was commander, he was making orders Fire, fire. The other one was further he could very clearly see what was the target. There were no mistakes, yes, that he saw that that was a cleaning. And they were for adjustments, you know, to targeted finally. And then what we began to investigate more and more. And he found out that in most of those 170 cases, that was either deliberate targeted attacks like this, or that they were indiscriminate attacks, but also without any care about what was there, and hospitals there. And this is the story we are trying to tell the world now. It is not the war, war is bad, everybody feels bad about the war. But there is something more sinister happening. And that is turning our values, our where value of human life of health care being being, you know, the part of outside politics, outside war, these values are being turned against us, and uses it as a weapon.
Elizabeth Cohen 46:51
Talk about that a little bit more why the Russians, from your description of it? are making such an effort to target a clinic? Why would they do that?
Pavlo Kovtoniuk 47:02
First of all, it's not only clinics, it's every part of civilian infrastructure, which is there, for example, in McCarrick schools were being bombed to water towers, they had water towers, to have them in the in the town. Every one every one of them was also destroyed by the target that tank fire just to deprive people of water in the city. And I am sure that you know all this atrocities in Bucha and 13. familiar names, but those are names of towns where the reporting reporters were allowed. On sites, there is about 10 to 12, places nearby Makati, one of them, which were very seriously destroyed. And in every of those towns, all civilian infrastructure was estroyed in order to inflict terror. You know, what was the result? People were fleeing. People were being terrified. And they were fleeing. And I don't know if you know that. But Ukraine now has a largest numbers of refugees, and internally displaced people since World War Two. 7 million fled the country with a population of 40,000,007 of them fled the country. And I think that was not a coincidence. Again, I think that was a tactic. Why think so because I saw that before. It happened in Syria. The wars in Syria and Ukraine are very different, of course, right. Ukraine has a world war two style war of aggression. Syria was a civil war. But Russia intervened Syrian war in 2015. And since 2015, there was 244 attacks on health facilities committed by Russian troops. Before that, America was already there fighting ISIS. You know that right? So coalition forces America and the European Union had four cases of hospital attacks in couple of years, four cases, all of them incidental. ISIS committed 10 hospital attacks. Russia committed 244 hospital attacks in Syria.
What we had as a result, a huge refugee crisis right to Europe. But that was 1 million of people fleeing into European Union creating the huge crisis in in in Europe. Now what was 7 million of those 5 million, went to Europe and 3 million went to only one country, Poland. And I think this is a tactic of war. I think this is weaponization of civilian infrastructure. And