Dr. Aleksandr Borzykh is an award-winning surgeon from Donetsk who came to Kyiv on vacation last August to visit his relatives. But on returning to his home city, he realized he could no longer live in a place occupied by Russian-separatist forces, amid constant fighting.
“They came to protect me,” Borzykh said sarcastically of the Russian-separatist forces. “I didn’t need their protection.”
So Borzykh, born in Russia in 1952 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, soon returned to Kyiv.
“My mom loved Ukraine with all her heart and brought us back,” Borzykh told the Kyiv Post. His mother had been deported to Soviet Russia after her parents were killed in 1937. She met his father there.
“I don’t harbor any anger toward the people I belong to,” Borzykh said. “It’s the worthless heads of the country, the old viewpoints, and Russia’s imperialistic politics that make me resentful.”
Borzykh graduated from Donetsk Medical University in 1976. Striving to improve his surgical skills, he established the microsurgery department at Donetsk regional trauma hospital, which headed until he moved to Kyiv last fall.
A pioneer in his field, in 2011 he received a government award in the field of science and technology for his achievements. In 1984 he became the first surgeon east of the Dnipro River to surgically reattach a thumb. He has since performed more than 300 surgical reattachments and revascularization of limbs.
Now, working at the Main Military Clinical Hospital in Kyiv, Borzykh says the operations he performs are very similar, but the workload is higher.
“While in Donetsk we mainly focused on and performed operations on hand traumas and diseases, here we’re dealing with transplantations onto other parts of the body,” he said.
Borzykh also said he noticed a difference between the Ukrainian soldiers he treats and the Russian-separatists he operated on in May-June 2014. He said Ukrainian troops have a strong patriotic spirit, whereas the separatists have an ideology that is anti-Ukrainian, and which labels the current government as a “fascist junta.”
“Why fascist?” Borzykh asked. “Does anybody even know?”
“One of the pro-Russian fighters, when he came to me in Donetsk, was covered in swastikas,” Borzykh said. “When I asked him: ‘So, what are your views of the (so-called) junta in Kyiv and pro-Ukrainian fascists?’ the fighter said nothing.”
The wounds Borzykh treats in Kyiv are “more severe compared to the ones back in the 1990s, during the bandit shootouts,” he said.
“Injuries from bomb blasts destroy tissue at the molecular level. When we actually perform operations, we see that there is more dead muscle, deeper than it appears on first inspection. Sometimes it’s impossible to see the borders of the wound.”
Rehabilitating patients is harder than the operation itself. The process of recovery does not end quickly. It can take up to two or three years for severe wounds to fully heal. But the Ukrainian soldiers he treats show courage long after they are brought wounded from the battlefield, Borzykh said.
“They’re the real heroes. Their morale is very strong, along with their motivation. They lose legs, hands, but don’t complain about their fate and are ready to move on.”
Borzykh often is asked whether he would return to Donetsk.
“Half a year ago I would have gone as soon as the flag was raised in Donetsk. But now I won’t go,” he told the Kyiv Post. “The reason is a simple. Relations with people and the emphasis on things have changed. Yes, there is a vacuum of information regarding Ukraine and the war. I went to Donetsk last fall to visit home. There was no Ukrainian TV. It was all Russian, with their brainwashing.”
Borzykh recalled the Petrovsk district in Donetsk, which had a huge TV screen blaring out Russian propaganda. “One rocket would have been enough to get rid of it,” he said.
And returning to Donetsk is a risk that Borzykh no longer wants to take.
“I do not want to lose anything else – we’ve already lost such a lot,” he said.
Kyiv Post writer Valeriya Golovina can be reached at [email protected].
