KYIV | The horrors of the war in Ukraine can be seen in the eyes of little Volodymyr, 13, lying on a bed in the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, with his green balloon in the shape of a dog.
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Her father and cousin were both killed when their car was riddled with bullets, just two days after the start of the Russian invasion. Hit in the jaw, back, arm and leg, Volodymyr miraculously survived.
“He still can’t walk, but the doctors told him it would be soon,” said his mother, Natalia, 34, exhausted by the events.
Before the war, like many young teenagers his age, he liked to play on his phone and walk their dog, she says.
Today he is stuck in a hospital bed. A large gash runs up his jaw to a lock of dyed blonde hair that falls across his face. He murmurs painfully that he is “fine”.
In a photo shown to AFP journalists on a mobile phone, we see his facial injury when he was rescued.
On February 26, two days after the start of the Russian invasion, the family blue Lada was caught in a firefight between Russian elements trying to enter the capital and Ukrainian forces.
“We didn’t really know who was shooting,” says Natalia. “But when the shooting stopped, we understood who was behind it all. They will be punished,” she enrages, nervously rubbing her arm.
The mother was only slightly injured. “My wounds will heal. But I cannot bring back either my husband or my nephew. He was only six years old,” she breathes.
“Difficult, excruciating”
This pediatric hospital, the largest in Ukraine, is on the front line of war trauma.
“It’s really terrible, it’s hard, it’s atrocious,” says pediatrician Svitlana Onysko.
From now on, “we live in this hospital. We don’t go home anymore, we are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the time. Morning, noon, evening, we help the children,” she says.
Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine to “demilitarize” and “denazify” it. But his invasion caused an increasing number of civilian victims, especially in besieged cities such as Kharkiv (east) and Mariupol (southeast).
The capital has been hit, but is not currently being shelled as is the case elsewhere. According to the town hall, four children were killed and 16 injured in Kyiv, most of them hospitalized in Okhmatdyt.
The nursing staff say they are haunted by the memory of the victims of these attacks.
Like this mother who made a rampart with her body to protect her one-month-old baby girl during a strike on her building. Doctors removed several shrapnel from his flesh.
Or that 4-year-old boy who had been brought in, injured, on a stretcher. Or this 6-year-old girl, shot in the legs in an attack in Gostomel, a town northwest of Kyiv, who killed her mother.
“It’s psychologically and morally difficult, because it’s about children,” says pediatrician Svitlana Onysko.
“Ignore”
The neonatology department of this hospital was even hit by the Russian army.
In the very early days of the conflict, mothers and babies had to seek shelter in the basement as soon as the air raid sirens sounded.
Despite everything, the nursing staff, who until then had no experience in war medicine, did everything to continue working in the face of what orthopedic surgeon Vlasii Pylypko described as “terrible injuries”.
“Since the start of the war, we have had to treat wounded people, children, but also adults, hit by missiles, gunfire,” he said.
Most of his colleagues “try to ignore it”, but “perhaps after the war some of us will need psychological support”, he explains.
In the meantime, he continues, “we are concentrating only on the treatment of hospitalized people”, like little Volodymyr: “We have to operate on him again. He has bullets lodged near the spine.”