DONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) – Her hands are blackened and dirty from battle. Some are still wearing their combat boots, small patches of black earth from the battlefield stick to their upper bodies, naked under the emergency blanket.
With their heads bandaged and limbs in splints, the wounded soldiers are carried to the waiting medical evacuation bus by members of the Hospitallers, a Ukrainian organization of volunteer medics working on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
All soldiers were recently wounded in fierce fighting in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have been pushing for advances. The battle at Bakhmut, a town now surrounded on three sides by Russian troops, was particularly bloody, and the soldiers recounted endless days of fighting, often at close quarters.
“We were traveling in hell,” said Yura, who, like all soldiers, only gave his first name for security reasons. He was lying on a bed in a specially equipped ambulance with badly injured arms and legs.
Blood stained the heavy bandages around his right forearm that held metal bars together to stabilize the shattered bone. His biceps bore a deepening purple bruise left by the tourniquet applied to stem the blood and save his life. The time it was put on was scrawled with a pen on his right cheek: 19:45.
“They tried to get me with grenades,” he said. Soldiers would only call his first name.
Unlike most of the wounded, Yura is not Ukrainian. He is Russian, but has been fighting alongside Ukraine in Bakhmut since November. The Muscovite native said he moved to Ukraine before the war, as did a friend of his who is also fighting for Ukraine and had spent 2 1/2 years in prison in Russia for a social media post with the caption Crimea – annexed by Russia in 2014 – was Ukrainian.
It was his own countrymen who wounded him.
He was in Bakhmut for “eight days of almost continuous fighting”. But he and his unit managed to repel all attacks on their position, he said.
The story goes on
“On the fifth day without sleep, I thought I was going insane,” he said. “In fact, it is impossible to sleep there. They shoot at it so that the earth trembles.”
He showed a video on his cellphone taken in Bakhmut: the interior of a devastated building, holes punched through the walls by artillery, rubble strewn on the ground. Beyond the twisted remains of metal from a window, a glimpse of an urban hellscape of shattered buildings and splintered trees.
Yaroslav, 37, was also wounded in Bakhmut. The battle was so close that Russian and Ukrainian forces fought room to room inside buildings, he said.
Pale and with a barely perceptible tremor, his lips almost white, he propped himself up on one elbow as he waited to be carried on a gurney from an ambulance to the bus for the ride to a better-equipped hospital in a town further west become.
An explosion had sent shrapnel through his leg, piercing it below the knee.
“I came to my senses and saw that there was no one around me, and then I understood that blood was seeping into my shoe, blood was spurting in my shoe,” he said, puffing quietly on a cigarette. “It was totally dark.”
When his unit attempted to move away from their position, Russian forces began shelling.
“When I left, everything was on fire,” he recalled. Dead Russians and also dead Ukrainians lay on the ground. “People ran into the streets and fell because mines were exploding, drones were flying.”
He finished his cigarette and lay down on the stretcher. His eyes fixed on an invisible point in front of him and he slowly closed his eyelids. The Hospitallers picked up his stretcher and carried it to the waiting bus.
Nicknamed the ‘Austrian’, the nickname of a paramedic from the hospital who died when another medical evacuation bus crashed, the medically equipped bus can carry six seriously wounded patients on stretchers and several other wounded walking.
“We carry out evacuations if necessary. It could be two or three times a day,” chief paramedic Kateryna Seliverstova said.
The bus bought with donations is medically better equipped than even some state hospitals, said Seliverstova. Equipped with monitors, electrocardiographs, ventilators and oxygen tanks, it can care for critically ill patients during transport to a large hospital.
“This project is really important because it helps save resources,” Seliverstova said. “We can transport six injured people who are in a serious or moderate condition,” while a normal ambulance can only transport one.
All six places were taken on the trip, during which Jura and Yaroslav were evacuated. Across the aisle from Yura, another soldier kept slipping into consciousness, a brown bandage wrapped around his head. A paramedic checked his vital signs on a monitor and helped him drink water from a syringe.
Behind him, a man coughed deeply. All that was visible of his heavily bandaged head was the black tip of his nose. He had suffered severe burns to his face.
Yura spoke quietly to one of the medics. Without changing his facial expression, tears began to run down his face. The medic leaned forward and gently wiped them away.
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Vasilisa Stepanenko and Evgeniy Maloletka contributed from Donetsk region, Ukraine.
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