Serhiy, a cardiac surgeon, stepped out from the Okmatdyt’s main building at about 1.30pm local time. He had spent the previous two hours stabilising his patient, a little girl who had been in the middle of open-heart surgery when the blast ripped through the children’s hospital. “There was chaos, glass flying everywhere,” he says. The surgeon and his patient were lucky. Across the yard the toxicology unit at the centre of the strike was in ruins. Amid the foliage in between lay a woman’s corpse, bloody legs sticking out of the carpet that had been wrapped around her lacerated body.