A Russian missile struck a warehouse near Kyiv two weeks ago, destroying 62 million items used to prevent H.I.V. in Ukraine, leaving aid groups working urgently to replenish the supplies.
The attack was part of a broader campaign of Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, including power plants, shopping centers and hospitals, which military analysts say is intended to make civilian life unbearable and inflict a psychological toll on the population.
The July 19 attack on the warehouse does not affect treatment for the roughly 250,000 people living with H.I.V. in Ukraine, but it may hobble efforts to prevent the virus from infecting others. The country’s epidemic is driven largely by the sharing of contaminated needles among intravenous drug users.
About two weeks before the attack, enough H.I.V. prevention supplies for the rest of 2026 had been sent to distribution centers throughout the country. But the destroyed warehouse contained about $3 million worth of syringes, needles, alcohol swabs and condoms for 2027.
If the items are not replaced by November, the country may see at least 16,000 new cases of H.I.V. in 2027, double the typical number, according to an estimate by the Alliance for Public Health, a Ukrainian nonprofit that manages the supplies.
“We cannot just replace condoms with sympathy,” said Andriy Klepikov, the executive director of the alliance.
Given disruptions from the war, most people at risk of H.I.V. have no other means of acquiring the prevention tools they need, he said: “They depend on our supply and they depend on the regularity of this supply.”
Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAIDS, condemned the attack as a “breach of international humanitarian law.”
“There are laws of war,” she said. “You’re not supposed to target medical facilities, schools for children.”
The strike on the warehouse was part of a broader air assault that day, which Ukrainian officials described as one of the war’s largest ballistic missile attacks, involving at least 41 missiles.
Videos and photos released by Ukraine’s State Emergency Services showed the logistics center where the warehouse was in ruins. Its red-and-white metal walls were buckled, and its steel frame was twisted and shrouded in billowing black smoke.
It is unclear what exactly the logistics center contained, and Ukrainian authorities have rarely disclosed whether military equipment was stored at sites struck by Russia. It is also unclear whether a military target, such as an air defense system or an army training ground, was near the logistics center.
Most recently, Moscow has waged a campaign against postal delivery hubs, damaging or destroying more than 400 belonging to Nova Poshta, a private postal service in Ukraine. Ukraine’s prime minister, Sergii Koretskyi, also said recently that 1.5 million Ukrainian books had been destroyed in attacks on printing houses, publishing facilities and book warehouses.
For most of the war, Ukraine largely confined its strikes inside Russia to military facilities and oil refineries that helped finance the Kremlin’s war effort. But as Kyiv’s long-range drone capabilities have improved, it has begun expanding its target list to include commercial infrastructure and other civilian assets.
In recent days, Kyiv has launched a series of strikes on warehouses belonging to Wildberries, a Russian analogue to Amazon. It has also repeatedly targeted the power grid of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity for days at a time.
