Ukraine, 1st July
In the moments before I found myself on the ground, coughing and checking if the floors above were about to collapse, I was sitting on a bench in the basement.
I was chatting with the brigade’s press officer when we heard a thunderous, ear-piercing crack: a guided aerial bomb had just hit our immediate vicinity.
I looked around, inhaling the dust. There was no collapse, but a zombie apocalypse atmosphere was definitely intensifying.
Fortunately no one was hurt. Some doors had exploded out of their frames, the staircases between some of the floors were partially destroyed, but it didn’t really matter because in the basement the never-ending medical work must go on regardless.
This Russian strike was the closest yet to the “Stabilisation point”, an underground shelter around Izium, a few kilometres from the Russo-Ukrainian front.
This is where the wounded soldiers of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, one of the most elite units of the Ukrainian army, are brought.
This is the first place where they receive medical treatment after the trenches, and from here, if necessary, they are taken to one of the few still operational hospitals in the area.
A couple of hours before, I was chatting to one of the soldiers:
-Do you believe in God?
-No.
-Well… maybe you should. Or at least in pine trees.
-What do you believe in?
-I believe in the fucking Russians out of here.
The first casualties started arriving at around 9pm, although the shift started to ramp up after midnight: most suffer injuries from FPV drones, shrapnel and artillery fire, but there are some soldiers whose source of injury are unknown. With them, all shades of pain descend underground.
The most seriously wounded are already given ketamine at the front, to make their pain bearable, but it’s not always enough.
Around midnight, a shrapnel-wounded soldier was brought in in a wheelchair with his arms bandaged and tourniquetted. He needed an operation, right there, right then. A few minutes later he was already waiting for anaesthesia.
More than a dozen wounded brought in from the front were being treated right in front of my eyes, some of them shockingly young.
Although this brigade is among the elite, it was clear that there weren’t many “professional” soldiers left. They could have been actors, stonemasons, IT specialists- those brought to the stabilisation point had all slipped into the trenches from another life. In their eyes I saw the endless sadness of the war.
I asked an anesthetist how bad the night was in terms of the number of injured. “I would say average, or maybe even relatively relaxed, because I’m standing here talking to you.” Once, in Bakhmut, they treated 150-200 wounded in two nights.
At around 3am, I was told that three heavily injured soldiers were about to arrive. The first of them arrived, high on ketamine. One of his legs had been in a tourniquet for 15 hours, the doctors knew immediately that it could not be saved.
While the medical team was attending to another severely injured person, the press officer told me that they were taking me out.
I left them working non-stop: whilst I was struck by the level of human suffering, they were used to it. For them, it was just business as usual.
I had 90 seconds to observe the destruction of the bomb that fell near the stabilization point. A building twenty metres away had collapsed. The bomb’s power was somewhat diminished by some pine trees: I suddenly got why they said I should believe in God, or in pine trees.
I arrived in Kharkiv in the morning. The sun was shining brightly, birds were singing, children were swinging in the playground. Russians attack Kharkiv every night, but from here you can’t see the underground operations, you can’t hear the voices of soldiers talking in a ketamine stupor, and you can’t smell the stench of four-day wounds.
Neither I nor the Kharkivians see the doctors of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade resting underground before the next twenty-four hours begin. My night with them had ended, but theirs never ends.
