Italian-Ukrainian citizen, nurse Artur Struminski decided to return to live in Ukraine, after years in Italy, on February 23, 2022. The day before Russia invaded the country. In Brodi, a small town in the Lviv region, close to the Polish border, he heard, at 4 am, the first jets. Then came reports of attacks on Kiev and Odessa. “At 7 am, our city was targeted by missiles,” he says.
He says that he gathered his mother, grandmother, aunt and niece and took them straight to the Polish border, where thousands of people had gathered, and had to wait on foot, in the cold, for more than 30 hours. The family left, but he, a Ukrainian citizen of military age, was unable to leave the country.
With experience in humanitarian conflicts, Struminski says that he enlisted to work with the organization Doctor Without Borders and was placed as a nurse on an adapted train with an ICU that, while evacuating civilians from conflict zones, treated injured patients. The reports in this report were made to the organization and shared with the Sheet.
“It’s hard to imagine how many civilians have been victims of this conflict. Until you get into an armed conflict, you can’t imagine how many victims it creates. But trip after trip, you see all these people with blast injuries, broken bones, amputations. you start to get an idea of ​​the scale of suffering that affects these people”, says the nurse.
Figures from the NGO indicate that almost half of the 653 people evacuated from conflict zones by the entity’s train between March 31 and June 6 were elderly and children, with shrapnel injuries from explosions and gunshots, as well as amputated limbs.
“The wounds of our patients and the stories they tell unquestionably demonstrate the shocking level of suffering that the indiscriminate violence of this war is inflicting on civilians,” says Christopher Stokes, emergency medical coordinator at the charity.
Stokes says the organization cannot claim that the warring forces specifically target civilians, but that “the decision to use massively heavy weaponry against densely populated areas means that civilians are inescapably, and therefore knowingly, being killed and injured.”
The organization lists what it has seen in rescue operations: civilians who are shot at during operations to remove them from conflict zones; indiscriminate bombings in residential areas; attacks on the elderly, among other things.
According to the organization, 11% of patients seen are under 18 years old, and 30% are over 60 years old. The NGO’s figures show that 20% of those injured were hit by bullets or shrapnel from explosions, and more than 10% of patients lost one or more limbs – the youngest, at the age of six.
An elderly woman in her 70s who asked not to be identified, treated on the hospital train, said that in the village where she lived in Lugansk, of the 500 residents, there are less than 50 left. She says she would hide under her bed whenever she heard a bombing, at the beginning of the war. She later moved into the basement of the house next door when the neighbors fled, but she had to leave her physically disabled husband behind because she couldn’t carry him. Another resident offered a basement to house the neighborhood, and on May 7, a bombing hit her home, with seven people inside — only two survived.
Another patient, a 30-year-old woman from Mariupol who also requested anonymity, says she put signs on the car in which she was fleeing the city warning that all the passengers were civilians and that there were children in the vehicle. Even so, they were the targets of a shooting attack, which hit her husband.
Nurse Struminski recalls attending to a 15-year-old girl with large-scale injuries from an explosion all over her belly, as well as shrapnel from a bomb along her spine. He also cites when he attended to a father who had his leg amputated and was with his 8-year-old daughter, who was shot while shopping in a supermarket – the attack killed the Ukrainian’s wife.
“Working on the train made me appreciate the peace I had before the war. Now I understand what a clear sky means, a peaceful sky. Maybe in the past I was a little selfish. I was thinking about my development, my future. This experience taught me that war is everywhere. Next time, you could be the person who needs help”, he says.
