in the heart of a military hospital on the front line, in the Donbass

At the city limits of Lysychansk (Ukraine)thick columns of smoke are visible. Military ambulances bring the wounded back from the front at a run to an military hospital where we saw very few journalists. An ambulance took seven minutes to extract a soldier from the fighting. The injured is conscious. After a scan, he is relieved: he has no shrapnel in his head.

In the room used for emergencies, three other soldiers have already been evacuated from the trenches. A doctor recounts the harm the Russian artillery does to his men: “That crushes the bones, it cuts the arteries, it tears the tissues, and we amputate a lot.“ In one of the hospital rooms, slightly injured people are resting. A soldier has shrapnel in his foot, but he does not intend to stop fighting: “There are guys who are dead, and I am alive, so of course I will go back.“