‘Doctors have to operate on patients who feel the pain’

As Russian airstrikes continue, Arpan Rai talks to Ukrainian medics working 22-hour days with a chronic lack of supplies

- Arpan Rai

Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s hospitals and power stations are pushing the country’s doctors to extraordinary limits, forcing operating theatres underground and leaving surgeons with little choice but to conduct complex procedures in the dark and with limited anaesthetic for patients.

Doctors in cities across the war-torn country spoke to The Independent about the toll of working 22-hour shifts in such punishing conditions, not knowing if their hospital could be the next target in Vladimir Putin’s renewed onslaught of drone and missile attacks.

Due to severe power shortages last week, surgeons were left with only four to six hours of electricity per day, crippling their ability to run operating rooms effectively, says Yuriy Boychenko, the founder of Hope for Ukraine, a charity supporting the country’s doctors and hospitals.

Difficult choices are being made every day to operate in dimlylit basements, deemed the safest place in the event of an airstrike, and at hours which are seen as the least likely to be disrupted by a Russian missile. These operating hours are not being disclosed for the sake of patients’ safety.

“The situation is hard to describe in words,” Boychenko tells The Independent. He says there was a noticeable shift in July, when Russia stepped up its attacks and power supplies across the country had to be rationed more strictly. “In July, the surgeons and doctors had to permit surgeries without power, in halfdestroyed surgical rooms, without any anaesthesia – or whatever the patient had received before,” he says.

What would normally be one dose of anaesthesia is being redistributed among two to three patients, he says, with the watering-down of doses becoming more severe closer to the frontline, where resupplying is hardest.