In theory, the highway allows only to circulate to barely 70 or 80 kilometers per hour, but Vova Bobalooriginally from the Lviv province, drives his ambulance at speeds that often exceed 120 kilometers per hour. Knowing that its status as a vehicle for the transport of wounded does not protect it from a eventual russian bombardmentconsider that pressing the accelerator is the best way to preserve the security of medical and human team that it transports, in spite of the innumerable potholes and sinkholes that this local route of the province of Donetskin addition to the narrowness of the road, flanked by bushes and meadowswhich hardly would allow the passage of a second vehicle in the opposite direction if it appears.
On board the van are the surgeon Ihor Alekseyevin addition to Bohdan Marchuk, a 25-year-old medical student in his last courses and a military man who acts as a security advisor. Equipped with a stretcher and first aid material to assist the wounded, the discreet pick-up goes into these daily dangerous routes, bombed on a recurring basis by enemy forces, to pick up, as discreetly as possible, at points pre-agreed and secret geographic locations, to the last wounded on the battlefront, whether they belong to the Army, whether they are bomb-affected civilians. The team, led by Svitlana Druzenkoy and belonging to First Mobile Volunteer Hospital Mikola Pigorov -a famous doctor of the nineteenth century considered as the world father of field surgery- is headquartered at town of Bakhmutin it donbas under Ukrainian control, although it remains constantly on alert and moves almost daily throughout the region. Nobody charges a penny for their task, despite the enormous personal and family wear and tear that this entails.
“The type of wounds we mainly treat are shrapnel impacts, in the case of civilians, in all parts of the body; in the case of the military, by wearing a bulletproof vest that protects them, the wounds are more frequent in the extremities and not so much in the abdomen,” says Svitlana. She assures that she has seen everything in these long months of experience that she has treasured treating a war wounded with Russia, but the cases that most surprise him are the patients that even presented symptoms that in principle correspond to those caused by chemical attacks, although he admits being unable to determine what type of substances have been used. “I have seen patients who cough, are disoriented, dizzy, but we can’t say anything else,” he stresses.
Ambulance parked in the bushes
As soon as they arrive at the meeting point, Vova parks the ambulance, painted in camouflage, among the bushes by the roadside. Any measure of prudence is insufficient to ensure that it is not spotted by the Russian forces, who constantly monitor the territory, either from their positions a few kilometers away or through dronesdrones. Serhyi Speed(speed in English) the soldier in charge of the entourage’s security, a man who prefers not to mention his last name for security reasons and who has been nicknamed by his comrades-in-arms because of how fast he can run, begins to give instructions: “if something happens, you have to hide behind those bushes; if something more serious happens, you have to hide under that bridge “, she assures, while pointing to a nearby ditch
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In case they appear wounded, the group has clear action protocols: “the priority is to maintain vital signs, that is, breathing and blood flow, the rest is secondary,” says surgeon Aleksiev. “We prefer to be bored than to have work, a day with nothing to do is a good day,” adds Vova.
The action, recognize the members of this volunteer brigadecan arise in a matter of secondsand sometimes it is not even necessary to go to the war front. After a couple of days of inactivity, the team receives a call in the early afternoon, and wow you have to grab his van and head with Svitlana and the rest of the team in an unknown direction, dodging vehicles and ignoring traffic signs within the city of Bakhmut itself. And it is that projectiles of unknown origin They just blew up, about half an hour ago, an apartment building in a suburb of the city. By the time they arrive, the building, a sector which is burning, has collapsed due to the violent explosionbut there are only a few bruised to deal with minor injuries. The bulk of the work here, in fact, is for the firemen, who after an hour begin to extract black bags with corpses inside.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.