DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine - At the big, noisy and dirty crossroad that leads to the city's entrance, armored vehicles drive past burnt buildings, except for one that sticks out - a tiny pizza parlor with a red cross painted on its wall.
This is the volunteer-run
medical station, where wounded and sick soldiers, as well as, civilians seek
treatment.
Situated on the
eastern edge of Donetsk Oblast along the strategic Kharkiv-Rostov-on-Don
highway where fighting has persisted since the Sept. 5 ceasefire, this is where
Olena Sontseslava, 25, a tender blond with bright eyes, manages the makeshift
treatment center.
“The soldiers most
often have wounds caused by mortar attacks,” she told the Kyiv Post. “The local
civilians usually come with
headaches or heartaches.”
Some 100 Ukrainian
servicemen have been killed at the hands of Kremlin-backed proxies since the ceasefire
was brokered in Minsk, and 600 were wounded, Ukraine’s foreign ministry
announced on Nov. 4.
In this warm and clean
clinic, medical instruments and pills are stocked in the pizzeria’s bar. Children’s
drawings hang on the walls. Warm clothes are piled in the corner. A small puppy
and a fat cat that wander around lend to the parlor’s atmosphere coziness. They
are precious pets for the soldiers, who spend months in dugouts.
Just before the Kyiv
Post’s arrival, military medics from the 101st army brigade visited the clinic
to get a fresh supply of patches for burns and special straps that help carry the
wounded from the battlefield.
Sontseslava praised
these doctors for their professionalism, saying they always give painkillers to
the wounded soldiers and properly bandage them, which simplifies her job very
much. When the wounded soldiers are brought to her clinic, Sontseslava gives
them secondary medical aid and then sends them to the main clinic in Artemivsk,
a city 30 kilometers northwest of Debaltseve along the same highway.
Sontseslava isn’t a
professional medic.
Just a year ago she
used to be an artist who painted stained-glass windows in Lviv. But after the EuroMaidan
Revolution started in Kyiv she volunteered to become a nurse. After Russia
started military aggression toward Ukraine in spring, Sontseslava took several wartime
first aid courses and travelled together with the 1st battalion of the National
Guard that was formed from among former EuroMaidan activists to the volatile
east.
Since May 1, when
Ukraine was engaged in the government’s anti-terrorist operation against
Russian-backed separatists, she arrived in Sloviansk, then the most dangerous
stronghold of insurgents. In the next months she would travel by ambulance and
assist surgeon Armen Nikogosyan, whom she met in Kyiv during the popular
uprising. The brave team saved hundreds of lives, bringing the wounded from the
hell of battle.
Since then Sontseslava
has had just a short leave of 1.5 months and recently returned to the war zone,
now serving in one of its most dangerous places, Debaltseve, which is
surrounded by separatist forces from three sides and often heavily shelled.
But Sontseslava says
she doesn’t feel tired. “This frightens me a bit. It seems like I’ve got used
to all this,” she said.
She said she doesn’t derive
any pleasure working with blood and death. “Don’t think I’m addicted to this. I
just realize there are not enough of professional doctors, so I have to do
their job.”
A young soldier comes
to her clinic with a sore scratch on his hand. Sontseslava carefully treats the
injury with an antiseptic. “In normal life you could just have the hand heal
itself and it would be fine, but now when it’s war it won’t be healed as easy,
so you need to be careful and regularly come here to treat it,” she told him.
Sontseslava currently spends
most of her time at the makeshift hospital, and visits the nearby military bases
to find out what their needs are and tell her volunteers what kind of help is
the most urgent. Recently, Sontseslava along with other volunteers, bought
wooden planks that were placed on the ground of dugouts so that the soldiers wouldn’t
have to sleep on the cold ground.
She also provides food
and used clothing collected by Kyiv volunteers from the Army SOS group to the
needy. “I choose the darker clothes for military men and give the brighter
items to civilians in need,” she said.
With a well-developed
system of volunteer organizations it surprises her when she discovers checkpoints
that aren’t supplied with essentials.
“A soldier just should
call his wife, complain about the lack of something, then she should post
information about his needs on Facebook and I’m sure soon the volunteers would
find out about this and bring some help,” she said.
After all the
sufferings she saw in the last six months it’s hard for Sontseslava to plan her
future, so she speaks about her dreams instead. “I dream about (having a) little
house in the Carpathian Mountains and three goats,” she said smiling.
But for now she is preoccupied
with the needs of the military than her own. “I think we all lack a real
strategy, which is essential to bring this war to an end,” she said.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support from www.mymedia.org.ua, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action, as well as Ukraine Media Project, managed by Internews and funded by the United States Agency for International Development.
