The battlefield medics tending to Ukraine’s wounded soldiers
The last thing Dima saw before he was wounded was a Russian kamikaze drone swooping down towards his trench. There was little he could do and the remote-controlled craft exploded next to him, spraying the Ukrainian infantry soldier with shrapnel.
Four hours later, weak and in what he stoically describes as “moderate pain”, the soldier is dropped off, wrapped in bloodied field dressings and a shiny space blanket, at the nearest medical stabilisation point.
Medics put him on a table, administer painkillers, remove his filthy battledress and within minutes are picking penny-sized pieces of metal out of his neck and shoulders.
Ukraine’s well-practised casualty evacuation drills normally hope to get wounded soldiers like Dima to medical aid far quicker, but nothing is easy on the battlefield.
Dima’s evacuation was delayed because of the threat that other Russian drones, or artillery shells would kill those trying to get him out.
“As soon as they could, they evacuated me, but it wasn’t possible at first because of the large quantity of drones flying over me,” he told the Telegraph.
A network of medical stabilisation points like this one in the Donetsk region is one of the cornerstones of emergency treatment for wounded soldiers in Ukraine.
Casualties are carried or even dragged from the battlefield by combat medics who keep them alive as best they can with first aid field dressings and tourniquets.
They are then put in vehicles and arrive at speed at the doors of the stabilisation point, whose locations have to be kept secret.
The medic who dropped off Dima hung around only for a minute or so, starey-eyed with subsiding adrenaline, before heading back to his unit at the front.
The task of the stabilisation post is then to do whatever they can to ensure the casualty can be kept alive long enough to reach a military hospital deeper in Ukraine.
“Everyone comes here, from the slightly injured to the very badly injured,” explains Oleksiy, the medical director. “Our mission is that we are located between the front line and the military hospital. We stabilise them here and our task is to help to deliver them to a military hospital.”
Staff are reluctant to discuss just how busy the stabilisation post gets: Ukraine closely guards its totals of dead and wounded as a matter of national security.
It has been clear that the country’s military has taken heavy casualties while holding back Russia’s larger and more heavily armed invasion force.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, in February said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Putin’s full-scale invasion of February 2022.
Other estimates of the Ukrainian toll have been far higher. United States officials in August put the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed at 70,000, with as many as 120,000 injured.
The Donetsk region where this post is located has been the scene of some of the war’s heaviest fighting. Oleksiy, who has worked here for nearly two years, will only say that it can get “very busy”.
An hour after Dima arrived, another unnamed soldier arrived, with a serious chest wound. Again he is hauled onto the table and surgeons quickly get to work. Shrapnel has penetrated his chest.
Oleksiy and his team put a drain in his chest, stabilise him and load him onto an ambulance to take him to hospital
“It was straight forward,” he says.
The post’s medics are supposed to work 24 hours on and 24 hours off, but shifts extend according to how busy they are.
“It’s meant to be 24 hours, but sometimes it’s 36 or 48 hours,” says Oleksiy, who was a general surgeon in a civilian hospital before the war.
“Then in a perfect world, it would be 24 hours rest, but often it isn’t. You can get used to anything.”
Staff spend much of their time living and working together. When they start a shift, they have no idea what awaits them, or how busy they will be.
The post is in an area which has been badly damaged by fighting and even now Russian glide bombs are a risk.
The working day is punctuated by air raids and trips to the shelter.
In quiet moments, staff chat, scroll through their phones, check equipment and supplies, or train on each other.
Pavlo, a quietly spoken former surgeon from Chernihiv, now treats soldiers arriving with shock and concussion. “Concussion can be from any kind of weapon that causes a shock wave,” he says.
He says he spends most of his time at the post and gives the impression of someone who is at a loose end when not working. He rarely takes leave, he says. “Normally, if I have a day off, I just sleep.
“Sometimes its calm and sometimes it’s so busy. It depends on the day and time of day.”
He spends his quiet moments getting ready, cleaning and sterilising instruments.
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