Christian Borys for New Pathway, Kyiv.
Standing proudly in this darkened hallway of an old Soviet style hospital, with his blue scrubs draped over him, Dr. Vladimir Mykut almost looks too young to be finished medical school but here, he is the go to surgeon.
His energy and amiable demeanour belie what his eyes have seen. In the last year, Dr. Mykut has dealt with more catastrophic trauma and death than many doctors will face in their entire careers.
He nonchalantly answers several questions before his attitude noticeably turns stern. He asks to see our passports and press certifications.
“You can never be too careful in this war.”
From the front lines around Mariupol, wounded Ukrainian soldiers are evacuated directly into the care of Dr. Mykut, his colleague, Dr. Vitaliy Nahorny, or one of three other Ukrainian military doctors at this relic of a hospital. Inside, nurses, wounded soldiers and visitors shuffle throughout the two hallways of the hospital as a young blonde woman, armed with a Kalashnikov, stands guard.
As he takes us up to the second floor of this building, simply named Mariupol hospital #1, Mykut says he can’t recall the last time it was this quiet. Just one night earlier, the doctors faced one of the worst nights of the war. A flood of soldiers, injured in the heaviest round of shelling in over a month, streamed into the hospital. That night, the Ukrainian forces lost twenty men. Seven were killed in action and a further thirteen wounded. Mykut says this hospital tended to nearly all of them.
Those evacuations can take anywhere from twenty minutes to one hour because Ukraine has been forced to refrain from using helicopters at the front. By then, the drastic wounds these soldiers suffer, the majority of which come as a result of razor sharp artillery shrapnel, may have taken their toll.
Dr. Ulana Suprun, an American doctor who left New York and founded Patriot Defence, an organization training Ukrainian soldiers in combat first aid, recently spent a week visiting Ukrainian hospitals along the line of contact, including this one in Mariupol. She compiled a report, based on a standard U.S hospital assessment, which tests a hospital’s ability to deal with mass casualties in disaster situations.
“None of the hospitals are prepared for mass casualties. The larger second line military hospitals in Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv boast that only 1% of the soldiers they care for pass away, but that’s because the critically wounded guys die before they can ever get to those hospitals.”
Dr. Mykut says that sometimes there is little they can do because they don’t have the means at this hospital.
“We can operate, but it’s like Vietnam war standards in here, or even 1943. People talk about America giving us weapons, but we don’t just need weapons from America, we need health care. Sometimes the lights just go out, we need things as basic as lamps.”
For Dr. Suprun, the problem stems right back to the frontline. Although the Ukrainians seem to have plenty of ambulances to transport from the front, she says that most lack basic life saving tools. “They don’t even have defibrillators, or if they do, they have pieces of ancient soviet equipment. In one, the defibrillator just looked like two cattle prods.”
The most alarming aspects of the report are not about the equipment, but rather, who is staffing the hospitals. Since many of the hospitals are just regular civilian hospitals, some close for the night, and most don’t have doctors capable of dealing with trauma. According to Suprun, other doctors might simply not want to.
“Soldiers told me they’ve driven into cities near their lines and had to ask locals where the hospital is and if they can even get a doctor. Then they’ll have to wake up a doctor, and that doctor might be a latent separatist, so imagine how that goes. They said there are some hospitals they don’t even bother going to because they believe the doctors are all pro Russian.”
The accusation that some of the doctors treating Ukrainian soldiers are actually pro Russian themselves is something that Dr. Mykut and Dr. Nahorny readily admit. “Half the town is pro Russian, and so were the doctors working at this hospital. They were the ones treating Ukrainian soldiers at the beginning so the military had to ship military doctors like us here. Some of those pro Russians have changed sides, but not everyone.”
As for how they treat captured separatist soldiers, when asked, Dr. Mykut and Dr. Nahorny proudly admit that they give their highest level of care, regardless of the person. In their opinion, soldiers are soldiers, and they deserve to be treated with respect. When asked if they think the Ukrainian soldiers receive the same from their enemy, Dr. Nahorny quickly shakes his head.
“We know they don’t. When Illovaisk happened, our boys who were wounded and treated by the separatist doctors came back with dirt and soil rubbed into the stitching of their wounds. This was not accidental work, it was done on purpose.”
Now that the most recent ceasefire of September 1st seems to be holding, Supruns mission is not only to educate the soldiers in case fighting does flare up again but to change the philosophy of the Ukrainian military as a whole. “The Ukrainian military's doctrine to medical care is carried over from Soviet days. They didn’t care about the individual at all at the beginning, they just thought, in this war if they have 1 million, we’ll send 2 million, so who cares if 1 million from each side die, we will have won. The individual soldier meant nothing and their lives didn’t matter. We want to change that.”
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