“A nervous young Russian soldier entered the basement where twenty neighbors were hiding and ordered all the men present to get out in ten seconds. I took a little longer, he approached me, aimed at me and shot me in the leg, “recalls Vasyl from the bed in which he is recovering in the district hospital of Brovary, the main city east of kyiv and now a refuge for displaced persons and wounded by the battles. His wife, Zina, is not separated for a minute. Not now, not when he was hurt. “I had bandages and painkillers because I’m a nurse, we put an emergency tourniquet on him and we managed to save his life. It took us two days to get permission to evacuate him through a humanitarian corridor. Before arriving at the hospital we already knew that his leg would have to be amputated, ”says the woman with a dull tone and her gaze fixed on the window of room number five of this hospital.
Every day of war increases the number of dead and wounded. According to the latest balance made by the United Nations at the end of last week, so far 977 people have died and 1,594 have been injured, numbers that will grow in the next balance and to which a face and name are put in this hospital. The wounded arrive at Brovary on the eastern front of the capital and now occupy 28 beds, a few days ago there were more than 150. In corridors and rooms war is breathed. The silence is broken with stories of brutality that for Ukrainians have become their macabre day to day since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on February 24 and sent thousands of men across the border.
Nobody here believes the word of Moscow, which assures that the second phase of the operation has begun in which the objective is to “liberate Donbas”, a strategy that could give rise to the illusion that the rest of the territory is free from threat. Everyone is following the news closely and celebrating Ukrainian victories such as the liberation of Trostyanets, which allows the supply line between Sumy and Poltava to be reopened, but they hope that victory will soon come to Bogdanovka, the epicenter of the fighting on this side of the capital. and the place from which most of the wounded arrive. Bogdanovka is only 20 kilometers away and the enemy tanks are still there.
“They have occupied our house”
Vasyl and Zina shake hands. They cannot help but look back and reminisce over and over again about the days under Russian control. “They have occupied our houses. They steal all the men’s and women’s clothes, the gold, the food from the refrigerators, the children’s bicycles and scooters, load it all on wheelbarrows and take it to their trucks. The great Russian Army is pure poverty. They dress worse than homeless people, they are dirty and often drunk”, details Zina excitedly. They were offered the opportunity to be evacuated to Russia, but no one accepted.
The key
-
977
people have died and 1,594 have been injured so far in the war, according to the UN -
Yuri
«Russia launched a cluster bomb and fragments entered my leg and belly»
Yuryi, from Dymerka, has been in room 31 for three weeks and has undergone several operations. She remembers that «I was running from my house to the shelter to hide and on the way I noticed a strong impact. Russia dropped a cluster bomb that burned down a house and spread throughout the neighborhood. Fragments entered my leg and stomach.” His roommate is Mikhail, who was shot in the leg, shot at point-blank range by enemy troops.
Room after room, the stories of the patients make up the horror film that Ukrainian civilians involuntarily star in. They are the protagonists, the heroes of a conflict that will mark an era. In this war, as in all, civilians are the great victims.
Doctors and nurses remain in the health center 24 hours
Doctors and nurses work and live in hospitals. Due to the security situation, they do not go home and remain in the center 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In the first month of war, the World Health Organization (WHO) has registered 64 attacks against the Ukrainian health network that have left 15 dead and 37 injured. “That equates to two or three attacks a day. We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms,” he said in a WHO-Europe statement, which does not attribute responsibility for them or specify in which areas they have occurred. The attack that has had the most repercussions is the one suffered by the Mariúpol maternity.
“We have lived here since the war broke out and we see horrible injuries, many of them caused by prohibited weapons such as cluster bombs. We were not used to receiving victims of a war, we are a peaceful people and this is a war against our civilians and the international community should stop it as soon as possible”, warns Volodymyr Andriiets, the center’s deputy director, who dedicates part of the meeting with the international press to try to get his message across the world. This doctor says that, among other things, they lack external fixators, the metal frames used to fix bones in place after an operation.
#arriving #hospital #knew #leg #amputated