Since the start of Russia's invasion, firefighters across Ukraine have been busy containing the devastation from air attacks. In theory, the Geneva Conventions forbid military forces from targeting them, or other first responders such as police and paramedics.
Firefighters are always among the first to arrive at a shelled location in Ukraine, along with medics and police. But in Kharkiv, they have also become targets of Russian attacks.
Similar to a tactic used by terrorist bombers, a “double-tap” attack involves hitting the same target a second time, leaving just enough time for first responders to be on-site and vulnerable.
Yevhen Vasylenko, the spokesperson for Kharkiv’s emergency service, says that on April 4 the service lost three firefighters as a result of such a strike.
Yevhen Vasylenko is a spokesperson for the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, which has lost several of its personnel to double-tap air strikes.
When the first drone attack happened at 1:10 a.m. that April morning, two groups of rescuers arrived. Forty-five minutes later, they heard the call “air” – a warning to leave the area and hide – but it was too late. Within minutes, there was a second explosion.
Mr. Vasylenko still remembers the cries of desperation of his colleagues that day. Firefighters are like a family, he says. They cook together, share holidays and spend a lot of time with each other. So when they lost three from one unit, it was a big tragedy.
Mr. Vasylenko says the Iranian-made Shahed drone targeted a programmed location.
“When we have a fire and are working on a spot with other rescue workers, we are not army staff, so we can conclude that the enemy strikes us deliberately,” he said.
In March, a first-person view drone, which allows the operator to see its target and surroundings, dropped a grenade next to a fire truck on the border with Russia, in the town of Vovchansk. Mr. Vasylenko believes that attack was also intentional. “You can’t mistake our fire truck with other cars – it’s too red and too big.”
Double-tap strikes are forbidden by international conventions, but they were often used by the Russian air force in Syria, where Moscow intervened on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad in that country’s civil war.
They are “doubly illegal because first responders are protected under international law. You shouldn’t target them, but you shouldn’t target civilians in the first place either,” said Julia Grignon, a law professor at Laval University.
Emergency workers respond to a Russian air strike in Kharkiv on April 7. Days earlier, three firefighters perished in a double-tap attack.
Smoke is a common sight in wartime Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city and the capital of a province, or oblast, also called Kharkiv. Russian forces have occupied parts of the oblast, but not the city itself.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, firefighters usually dealt with household fires and gas explosions. Nowadays, they’re frequently tasked with rescuing people from under the rubble of destroyed buildings, looking for human remains and clearing debris. In addition to their regular uniforms, they now wear 10 to 15 kilograms of body armour. “It’s difficult, but we need to save people,” Mr. Vasylenko said.
Turgut Abbasov’s fire station is located in North Saltivka, the most heavily shelled district in Kharkiv in 2022. His team was responsible for putting out localized fires after the shelling. “We had situations when seven or eight apartments were on fire at the same time. It’s not one or two, and you don’t have water and electricity in the building, but you have to go inside and stop the fire,” Mr. Abbasov said.
He showed The Globe and Mail windows covered with sandbags and black canvas in his room at the fire station. “It’s protection from possible shelling. We had one at 7:15 on Jan. 23,” he said. “That day I woke up early in the morning. And when the air alarm started, I gave the order to go to the shelter to the whole team.” He heard one explosion, about 1.5 kilometres away, then a second. An X-32 or X-22 missile exploded some 20 metres from the station. The radius of destruction of such weapons can be as much as a kilometre wide. There are only civilian buildings near the station. It was a miracle that no one on the team was injured.
Turhut Abbasov, left, and his firefighter team work in a Kharkiv neighbourhood that was among the hardest-hit in the first year of the war.
Jan. 23 saw one of the biggest missile attacks on the city so far in the war. Eleven people were killed, including one child, and 103 were injured, said Serhii Bolvinov, the chief police investigator for the Kharkiv region. “They started deliberately shelling the same locations twice that day, understanding that there will be medics and rescuers there.”
Mr. Bolvinov says that when Russian commanders give the same co-ordinates for a second attack, there’s no other goal than to kill a larger number of people – making it an intentional violation of international law. The main goal is to scare the local population and drive them out of the city.
Similar double-tap attacks were carried out this year in Odesa and Zaporizhzhia, where rescuers have also been killed and injured. Ukraine’s emergency service says 91 of its rescuers have been killed and 352 others injured since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, 2022.
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