Ukraine war traps care home, clinic residents on front line

Tamara Makarovna spends her afternoons sitting in a dilapidated armchair upstairs in her care home, watching an old TV set and talking to her neighbours. The 81-year-old is a resident of a state-run care home in war-torn eastern Ukraine, just a few kilometres from the front line with the proRussian rebel insurgency. She is one of thousands of elderly and ailing people stuck in state institutions as conflict rages close by. The woman moved to her care home in the tiny village of Novomykhaylivka from a nearby town in 2011 after leg surgery left her unable to live alone. The care home suffered a direct hit from a shell, Tamara says. Monitors from Ukraine’s National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) watchdog carry out inspections of such state-run facilities and recently visited Novomykhaylivka accompanied by a couple of journalists.

“The war has dramatically affected” such facilities, NPM monitor Tetyana Pechonchyk said, with 50 care homes located within the conflict zone on both sides of the front line.

Residents in rebel-controlled areas face a lack of food and medicine, while for those in areas under Kiev control, the main problem is their proximity to the front line and the risk of death, Pechonchyk said. Despite the threat from shelling, Tamara has opted to stay here. “I have nowhere else to go. Every day I ask the Lord to make them stop (fighting and shelling).”

The care home currently accommodates 31 people, who pay some 75 per cent of their 1,300 hryvnias ($50) monthly pension to stay in the two-storey building. “Our cooks prepare us soups, cereals. And on Thursdays, we sing songs and dance,” Tamara said. Her pension, she said, was “enough for small expenses”. In another troubled war zone location, NPM monitors accompanied by reporters visited a tuberculosis sanatorium where some patients also found themselves unable to leave after completing treatment, because of the conflict.

The facility is located in the Kiev-controlled village of Gostre just 10 km from the front line. Treatment of tuberculosis patients in isolated residential facilities is still common in ex-Soviet countries.

Out of some 100 patients currently staying, about 10 have got stuck here long-term, usually because of expired ID documents needed to cross the conflict zone, the chief doctor Valentyna Kozhevnyk said.

“We don’t force anyone to stay here — we just don’t have anywhere to send them,” she lamented.