The hardest night wasn't that long ago.

It must have been at the end of April.

The Russian army concentrated its units around Severodonetsk.

106 Ukrainian soldiers arrived at the hospital that night, hit by shrapnel and bullets.

Men who had been fighting in the Donbass just hours before now needed to be rescued, and quickly.

If the metal stays in the body for too long, the wound becomes infected.

So it has to come out as soon as possible.

Othmara glass

volunteer

  • Follow I follow

So says Oleksiy Horehliad, a surgeon at a hospital in Dnipro.

He stands at the operating table almost every day, cutting, drilling and sawing.

That was the case even before Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine, but it hasn't calmed down for months.

He's working overtime again today.

The light of the evening sun shines through the white-painted panes of his office.

Horehliad is forty years old, he heads the orthopedic traumatology department of the hospital in south-eastern Ukraine.

The wall is covered with framed certificates and awards.

In front of his desk is a replica of a skeleton.

The skull hangs askew, it almost looks as if the skeleton is laughing.

Horehliad makes himself some coffee.

In more peaceful times, he heals broken bones and repairs broken joints.

"If an elderly lady slips and breaks something, she ends up with me," he says.

But at the moment there are only a few seniors on the ward.

Since the war, Horehliad has operated mostly on young men, army personnel and volunteers from the Territorial Defense Forces.

Five hundred soldiers are wounded every day, says Ukraine's defense minister, and about a hundred die every day.

Other government sources speak of 100 to 200 dead.

At the front, the military doctors have to decide: who can still be saved, who should be taken to Dnipro?

Yaroslav, a 32-year-old Ukrainian soldier, was lucky.

His unit defended a settlement near a forest.

There were four of them and they were supposed to destroy a tank, he says in Russian.

He finds it difficult to speak, but he really wants to talk.

He was sitting in a trench when the tank fired into the forest.

He heard an explosion and felt that he could not move.

Yaroslav is tall and very slim.

He shaved his hair on the sides and tied the rest in a ponytail.

His dog tag dangles around his neck.

He groans in pain, Horehliad operated on him just a few hours ago.

A metal frame sticks out of his leg, and blood flows through a tube.

His military backpack is next to the bed.

"It was excruciating pain"

After he was hit, two comrades dragged him a mile through the woods until they could take a break.

Somehow they made it through the shelling.

Other men were torn to pieces.

Military medics tied a tourniquet, a cuff designed to stop blood flow, around Yaroslav's thigh.

"It was just excruciating pain, I begged them to take it off." From the evacuation point, a brigade ambulance took him to a hospital in Kostyantynivka, where he underwent his first operation.

Then he came to an intensive care unit in Dnipro.