VIENNA – The tall, lanky figure of Oleg Sankovsky slowly emerges from a hospital ward. He looks very much out of place in Rudolfsstiftung Hospital in Vienna. This is the first trip abroad for the 29-year-old former miner from eastern Ukraine.
On Aug. 8, Sankovsky’s house in the city of Krasny Luch in Luhansk Oblast was hit by a mortar shell. It shattered the window, showering his face with shrapnel.
“It was a big ball, which broke up into egg-size pieces,” he recalls. “And then my eye felt as if someone pounded it hard.”
Sankovsky ran out of his flat on the fifth floor, screaming for help, his face a bloody mess. “I cried ‘Help me!’ – but nobody opened the doors,” he says. Around that time Russia-backed separatists were taking over Krasny Luch, and heavy fights were common in the streets. The separatists have held the city ever since.
Eventually one of the neighbors opened the door and gave Sankovsky first aid. Then at the local hospital his face was treated further, but not his eye. “The doctors tried to save my face, but nobody took care of the eye because the oculist had left for Crimea,” he says.
Later in Kharkiv his broken cornea was patched up, but the crystalline lens was shredded into pieces by the hit, and had to be removed. He could no longer see anything with that eye, except bright light, and thought it would stay that way forever.
But then, he was lucky to be picked out to be sent to Vienna for treatment. A group of Kharkiv volunteers set up by millionaire-turned-activist Vsevolod Kozhemyako had agreed with the Austrian government a small program to treat five civilians wounded during the war in Ukraine at no cost for the victims.
“I had a conversation with Ambassador (Wolf Dietrich) Heim, and said to him: ‘Let’s do something for Ukraine,’” says Kozhemyako, who owns an agriculture empire that sells commodities globally. “He said they (Austrians) were prepared to do a program for civil victims of the war, and ready to treat them. They were ready to take five complex cases.”
Hans-Peter Glanzer, head of Unit for Humanitarian and Food Aid, Relief Fund for International Disasters at the Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs, says he is glad his government is helping with “concrete actions.”
“The costs of the operations are taken care of by federal province governments, and it’s more or less pro bono treatment,” he says. The central government has spent 7,000 euro on plane tickets.
The logistics of the program are fully handled by volunteers of the Kharkiv-based Foundation For Peace and Order. It supplies soldiers at the frontline with equipment and provision, and handles the small Austrian treatment program as a sidekick.
Kharkiv-based volunteers were tasked to select five patients that could not be treated at home for lack of resources or medical know-how. Sankovsky, for example, received triple transplants of various parts of the eye – an operation that could have cost up to 50,000 euro, according to local volunteers.
Other patients had the functions of their limbs restored through complex operations in a hospital in Lower Austria.
None of the Ukrainians had been abroad before or had special passports for foreign travels or Schengen visas before being selected for a trip to Austria.
“I find places for them to live, other volunteers take up the visitors to their homes, and we also walk them around museums for a couple of days, around the city, take pictures to give them good impressions,” says Oleksandra Saienko, one of the volunteers in Vienna.
Most of the the victims come from rebel-controlled territories and do not want to return home after the trip. “One woman told us she can’t go back to Luhansk because she was going to be killed,” says Saienko. “She had nothing at all on her, we had to find warm clothes for her and fund-raise money for her to continue treatment at home.” Most of this effort happens online though Facebook.
Sankovsky plans to go back to Kharkiv and find a job at a construction site there, like his younger brother. He says the mine where he used to work in Luhansk region, named after Izvestiya newspaper, has not paid its workers for eight months.
Katya Gorchinskaya is deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Post. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
