‘They killed my people and think it is OK ... They will be punished’
A doctor who saved Russian lives in his home city of Zaporizhzhya says that only with more enemy casualties will the conflict end
The ambulance pulled up, the waiting medics sprang into action, and a young soldier, his arm already in a sling, blood all over his clothes, was carried carefully from the back.
Then two more: one struck on the helmet by flying shrapnel, stunning him. The other too close to an explosion, left unable to stand by the blast wave. Possibly brain damaged. “Light wounds,” said Viktor Pysanko, the young doctor who directs the Zaporizhzhya military hospital.
Dr Pysanko is only 35, but there are few people in Ukraine who know more about battlefield trauma injuries.
A former chief medic with the Ukrainian airborne, he has served in the 2014 war in Donbas during Russia’s first invasion, with Nato in Kosovo, and until recently was seconded to the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Recalled from Africa as Ukraine braced for a possible Russian invasion in January, he was put in charge of the military hospital in his home city.
Since Feb 24, he has been processing casualties from the entire southern front of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The casualties arrive at all times of day or night, bent into every grotesque shape and manner of mutilation that modern weaponry can conceive.
It has left him sleep deprived, angry, and caught between his devotion to saving lives and the needs of war.
“These f-----g animals, they came to my country, they killed my people and [think] it is OK,” he said. “And when the war is finished they will be punished.”
“This really is war like the First World War or the Second World War. Even in Africa, I have not seen atrocities, war crimes like the ones I am seeing in my own country.”
That does not affect his Hippocratic
Oath. He has treated five Russians since the war began. All survived.
“We are not animals, unlike them. We have a sense of humanity,” he said.
“But the ugly truth, he said, is that only killing will end this war. The more Russians we kill, the more bodies go home to mothers in Russia, the quicker they will understand this is war,” he said.
“The more Russians we kill, the quicker Russia will understand, in the 21st century you cannot come and kill civilians and kids.”
One reason for his anger is the belief that the Russians are pursuing a form of total war that targets civilian areas as well as medical staff and facilities.
Early in the war one of Dr Pysanko’s clearly marked civilian ambulances was attacked. The Kharkiv blood bank was also bombed.
On Wednesday the Mariupol maternity and children’s hospital was hit by air strikes. City authorities there said it was difficult to treat casualties because most of the other medical centres had already been hit.
Dr Pysanko says Russian saboteurs tried to block the entrance of his own hospital with a civilian car in order to disrupt ambulance services.
“It is real fascism like in 1941,” he said referring to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. “It is exactly the same. They got to another land, they kill people, they burn guys.”
Ukraine’s high command has done a good job of suppressing both the numbers and details of their own casualties since the war began, while publicising Russian losses.
It is a deliberate strategy designed to raise public morale.
But the doctors, nurses and porters here are face-to-face with what Dr Pysanko calls “the full spectrum” of injuries. A paramedic who picks up casualties from the front showed The Telegraph pictures on her telephone to illustrate what that means.
Gunshot wounds differ depending on the organs they hit and the bullet used. Some are designed to fragment inside the body. Others pass straight through heads and torsos.
Shrapnel severs legs and arteries, slices off genitals, and embeds deep in internal organs. Shockwaves burst lungs and destroy hearing.
Chunks come out of skulls opening a window to the brain, hands shrivel up into black claws, limbs come back looking quite literally like minced beef from a butcher’s shop.
And the heat blasts of air strikes leave men’s faces a sticky, black mess.
Those with more serious wounds might spend many more months in the specialist burns and skin transplant hospital in Dnipro.
The challenge is made worse by a
‘It is real fascism like in 1941. They got to another land, they kill people, they burn guys’
dire lack of modern medical equipment. “I haven’t seen a hospital this poorly equipped even in Africa,” Dr Pysanko said. “If Europe won’t give us weapons, at least give us medicine.” “I need an X-ray.
“I need an MRI scanner. I need express analysis for the blood for screening for the patients. I need first aid kits. Basic things, tourniquets.”
The newly raised territorial defence battalions, lack basic first aid kits and tourniquets. Experienced soldiers have said the new units also lack helmets and body armour, making injuries more likely.
Dr Pysanko’s career has been marked by Russia’s war against Ukraine from the beginning.
As a recent graduate, he was at the beginning of a civilian medical career when war broke out in Donbas in 2014.
He found himself ordered to the front and found himself rapidly promoted to chief medic of 25th Airborne Brigade, an elite unit at the sharpest end of the fighting against Russia’s first invasion that summer.
His 2014 war ended when he was shot three times. After recovery he was seconded to the Nato mission in Kosovo as a rest assignment.
He later served with the United Nations mission in Congo – a much more peaceful place than Ukraine at the moment, he says.
The Zaporizhzhya military hospital is the “role three” facility – a place wounded on the frontline are sent for emergency surgery – closest to Ukraine’s southern front.
Since the invasion on Feb 24, it has handled more than 200 casualties from battles around Mariupol, Kherson, and Donbas.
The pace of work reflects the ebb and flow of the war.
On the day The Telegraph visited, the Russians appeared to have halted their offensives to regroup.
Only seven casualties had arrived by 4 PM. The previous day it was 23. The day before that – a particularly bad one – there were more than 40. On the first day of the war, more than 50.
The most recent casualties came in from frontline around the village of Huliaipole in the eastern part of Zaporizhzya region, where Ukrainian troops have for several days been trying to hold back a probing Russian force seeking to cut a strategic road.
The “light wound” that came in on Wednesday afternoon was relatively simple for the doctors to deal with.
An X-ray showed the upper arm shattered in multiple places and a long black lozenge that Dr Pysanko recognised as shrapnel.
Surgeons assessed the damage with ultrasound, used a magnet to tug out the shard of metal, and bolted the bone together with a household drill.
“Even that will be a couple of months of rehab. The bone is completely shattered, it takes time to knit,” said Dr Pysanko. Outside, Colonel Yevgen Bondar and two other soldiers were waiting for an ambulance to take them to another hospital for recovery.
Both had arrived three days earlier after being struck by the same tank shell during a Russian assault on Huliaipole leaving with badly scarred faces and bloodshot eyes, but no lasting damage.
“Shrapnel. Here and in the leg,” said Col Bondar, who sported a bandage under his right eye that made him look a bit like a pirate. “You could say I was lucky. If it had been a fragmentation shell I’d have lost my sight.”
“I’m just waiting at the moment till my eye can see again. There’s already progress. They say in five to seven days I’ll go back.”
“I can already make out silhouettes. They say it will recover. I’ll take all the drops to make it heal quicker, or the damned war will end without us.”