I first learned about the war from my Ukrainian in-laws who lived in Kyiv and had to escape the city under heavy bombardment, and just about managed to make it before all the main highways leading out of the city were destroyed by Russian artillery. This war became personal to me there, and then.
I spent the first couple of weeks glued to various screens. I was filled with rage and despair seeing the tragedy unfold in real time, familiar and much-loved places being wiped out, scores of innocent people being killed, and maimed. I spoke to my numerous Ukrainian friends, those that were not cut out by the war, and I was worried stiff about the ones that were. It was like living in a nightmare, but it would not go away, even after you opened your eyes…
Then I realised that I needed to do something therapeutic to pull myself out of that hole for my family’s sake, as it was just becoming unmanageable. Panic and anxiety follow similar pattern to virus replication cycle – if they infect a vulnerable host, they first overwhelm its immune system, then quickly infect those in proximity. But the same pattern could be seen with calm and composed demeanour which particularly stands out when most of the others succumb to panic. Both are highly infectious, but it is our choice – we cannot always control life events but could learn to control our response to them.
It became very clear to me that the most effective way of fighting this very personal war, which was taking place inside of me was to transform my passive, destructive, emotional responses into practical actions, even on a small scale. Of course, it had to have a real value to the people on the receiving end. There was not a shortage of Ukrainian names on my contacts list – since the start of the war in the eastern Ukraine in 2014 I had been involved in a few educational projects there. I had attended conferences, and conducted seminars, and training sessions in a few cities there, as well as brought Ukrainian colleagues over here for short-term clinical attachments. I was able to contact them directly and find out what was needed the most. I also managed to get in touch with a few anaesthetists who volunteered to go to the frontline and were involved in setting up tactical medical services, as well as training centres for combat medics. The ground was set for my personal humanitarian project aimed at helping my Ukrainian colleagues.
I set up a crowdfunding page and have been truly touched by people’s generosity. I was able to prepare for my first trip to Lviv within a couple of weeks. I even had a van given to me by a friend of a friend with £500 on top to be used for filling it up. I bought tactical medical supplies, as well as some bulletproof vests and ballistic helmets for several teams of medics that I was in contact with. It turned out that body armour of high quality was, and still is in short supply among them as the army prioritises it to the combat units, so the rate and scope of injuries among frontline medics is disproportionately high.
One of the many patriotic posters which are ubiquitous all over the city. This one says “We are standing on our soil, and you will be inside it!”. Photography of the city itself were strictly banned at the time.
I made it to Lviv without any major problems. The Polish-Ukrainian border crossing was not as bad as I had anticipated. It was the Polish customs officers, all of them rather stern-looking young blonde women who gave me a bit of a hard time – they searched through the boxes and demanded all the paperwork especially for the body armour, as well as questioned me about my funny-looking van that did not belong to me. Finally, they released me into the arms of the Ukrainian border patrol officers, who had quite a cognitive dissonance looking at my British passport, which indicated Moscow as my place of birth, and my car registration, and speaking Russian to me. It is in my favour that the British are highly respected due to the strong support from our government. I was let into Ukraine without any hesitation, with a big smile and thumbs up.
The gate was open, and there I finally was. It had only taken me two days to get there, and it was my first thought, when I finally did. The realisation of how close it was. There I was in a place where a brutal war was raging on, and it was only two days’ drive from home. I had to stop and let that thought sink in. There were a lot of signs that reminded me of where I was – there were tents where refugees could get basic medical help, and some advice on their choices once in Poland, pop up shops selling snacks, and various everyday necessities, scores of women, elderly people, and children, either on foot, or inside their cars queuing up on the Ukrainian side, while vans, and lorries with plates from all over Europe were getting in. I was the only one with British ones.
I stayed with a colleague, whom I had never met in person before. A word had come out that I was paying a visit, and a stranger offered to stay in their house. There are no hotel rooms available, as they are all being used for housing internally displaced Ukrainians.
I arrived late, having navigated through Lviv’s narrow cobbled streets with the help of intermittently working Google maps, and a very poor internet connection. We sat down for a late dinner, and then the air raid sirens went off. It was my first introduction to their everyday reality. Everyone calmly walked down into the basement. It was an old Austrian-built house (Lviv had once been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and that basement had been used by the family (the grand grandparents of the current owners), who had lived there during German occupation in the 1940s, while German officers had stayed upstairs. There are a few similarities between the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the current Russian one, and that was probably the most personal one.
The basement felt “lived in”, if only eighty years before – you could see that people had been staying there for a long time before and had tried to make it comfortable. There was even a fireplace, and oak floorboards. It was old, and out of date, and covered with dust, but you could easily imagine living there after doing some basic facelift.
We took our pasta dishes and wine with us, and my first experience in the makeshift “bomb shelter” turned out quite a pleasant one. The family is medical – the young couple, an anaesthetist and a neonatologist, her father, a well-known gynaecology Professor, his wife, and a couple of other siblings with their kids, none of whom has anything to do with medicine. The Professor showed me his grandfather’s medical diploma in Latin, issued by an Austrian medical school, as well as a letter of thanks from the Austrian Imperial Ministry of Defence for helping to stop an epidemic of Typhoid among the troops during WW1. The time flew quickly before another air raid siren announced the end of the bombing, that did not happen. Generally, there is no way of knowing where missiles are flying to, only where they have been launched from, so the whole of Ukraine goes “red”, and people are advised to go down into their bomb shelters and wait for further instructions.
Otherwise, the evening went on peacefully. The house felt warm, and homely with three generations of the same family living in it and having done so for several generations. However, something was not quite normal, and it was the arsenal of guns clearly visible, but not accessible to small children. Some of the guns were probably as old as the house and had been used to kill Russians before (there is a long history between the nations, and Ukrainians have always been ready for war with their neighbours). There were also modern automatic, and sniper rifles, as well as handguns. My new friend had given handguns to his wife as a present for the International Women’s Day on March, the 8th (two weeks after the start of the war) after she had refused to leave for Poland with the kids. He paid for her to learn how to shoot with an instructor too. Thus, any conversations about leaving the country were finished for now.
Just casually preparing for an airway talk for anaesthetists and intensivists at a local hospital. With a sniper rifle of the owner of the house on the background. The security situation in the city was volatile at the time.
I also found out that there was a civilian snipers’ association in the city, a 2000-strong group of regular guys and girls, who have been training with military instructors on the off days from their day jobs since the start of the war in the East in 2014. They have all completed their required certifications and are battle ready. My host was one of their leaders. Still a civilian anaesthetist during the day, he would organise small combat ready groups of snipers to go to the frontline for short-term missions in close cooperation with the regular military command. The level of self-organisation, integrity and discipline of those guys are one of the things that impressed me the most.
While there, I also visited an underground drone factory, which looked as crazy as it sounds. A bunch of students from an Aviation College, which had been demolished by Russian rockets, had come together, managed to secure some funding from wealthy Ukrainian businessmen, and were assembling rather sophisticated drones from some spare parts bought on the internet. Their “laboratory” occupied a basement in an abandoned office building, and they often stayed there well into the night, without being interrupted by air raid sirens. Again, the levels of self-organisation, teamwork, and dedication to the cause were inspiring to observe.
At the hospital delivering that lecture. There were a few air raid sirens, which we missed.
I did visit a hospital too, where I gave a talk on major bleeding to the anaesthetists, and intensivists. Lviv is relatively far away from the frontline, so most of the combat trauma they receive was “tertiary” including reconstructive, and plastics procedures. Elective work, which had been initially interrupted by the war was building up too. Some female doctors had left for Poland, and beyond; some had moved to Lviv from other places affected by the war. Talking to them I realised how strong their connection to home was. There was a doctor from Kharkiv, a major city near the Russian border, which had been heavily bombed since the start of the war. He had managed to send his family to Poland a few weeks earlier, while he himself had moved to Lviv, and was working at the hospital I visited. He told me that his wife was insisting on them moving back home to Kharkiv. She was just overwhelmed by her new life in Poland. Despite a warm welcome they had received, she did miss their home, and husband too much, and was willing to accept the risks involved. You could tell how difficult that decision was for him, but also how hard his life had become – he had lost his home, both the roof over his head, and its inhabitants and now having to live in the hospital, and going to the basement every three, or four hours. This was a situation I deeply sympathised with and was truly hoping not to ever have to deal with myself.
Bomb shelters was one of the most memorable experiences during my first visit. At the time, the city centre was not being bombed. However, there were a few rocket attacks at the infrastructure, including one just a day before I came when a power station on the outskirts of the city (and a few residential buildings) were targeted. The air sirens were heard up to ten times per day, and you were supposed to go down to a shelter, which were mostly basements underneath the buildings that you find yourself closest to. There are probably “proper” purpose-built bomb shelters somewhere, but I did not see one. In bigger cities, where there are underground train systems those are used as bomb shelters. There is no underground in Lviv, so all you could do is sit at a basement, and hope that this one is just a nuisance too and pray that they will not hit the house above you. Because if they do, then nobody would stand a chance of getting out alive.
In the basement with the family during an air raid
The first time I sat at the shelter was quite a strange experience. We were having a meal with my hosts, and just carried on downstairs when we heard the sirens as if nothing strange was happening. It was early evening, and having just met each other, we all had a lot of questions that we wanted to ask and were genuinely interested in what the answers were. The kids were also excited about their presents, so the general mood was cheery, and not at all unpleasant. However, when I was woken up again at 2 a.m., and had to go down there, the atmosphere was quite different. Everyone just wanted it to be over so that they could go back to sleep. Then, the sirens just kept on going off every three hours, and with the novelty of a British visitor disappearing, the heavy toll this was having on people’s mental health was palpable. Just the necessity of having to hide in the basement on a regular basis, even without actual explosions was making you feel helpless, taking away any control over your life, and that of your family. It was psychological warfare, and some people were clearly giving up without a fight. In one of the shelters, I saw parents completely withdrawn, and scrolling their phones all the time while their kids were left to their own devices and trying to entertain themselves, while others were clearly taking it upon themselves to be leaders of their families, and be an epicentre of calm, and composed attitude, which was quite infectious. It was a life lesson that I will never forget. Kids playing in bomb shelters is another image that will stay with me for a long time. I can tell you that there is nothing normal about that site and should never be.
Some soft toys donated by my kids to the daughters of the family I was staying with.
Despite all the awfulness of war, the war crimes being committed by the Russians that I heard first-hand of, and you might find too upsetting to read about, the everyday struggles of the ordinary Ukrainians that I only superficially shared during my stay there – I came back inspired by the bravery of people fighting for their very survival as a nation. I returned home with a reinforced belief in humanity, in the basic values that make us human. Paradoxically, having visited a war zone, where humans kill each other on an industrial scale made me believe in the future of humankind. The realization is simple – the good is fighting with the absolute evil, and everyone has to make a simple choice of which side they are on. If you do not make an active choice, if you are one of those who say that they are not interested in “politics” then the evil sucks you into its dark army of faceless orcs regardless. Having met many Ukrainian warriors, that is what I felt – they are all individual Human Beings who have made their choice to join the Army of Light, whereas Russians, both the real, and internet army foot soldiers seem like they have been drafted into a faceless Army of Darkness.
One day, we might all have to make that choice. No half measures, no grey undertones, no lying to yourself. I hope that my trips to Ukraine will help me make the right one.
My mission was a success on many levels – I brought a fair amount of much needed tactical medical disposables (tourniquets, Celox, compression bandages, IFAKs), which were delivered directly to the medics on the southern, and eastern frontlines that I was in direct contact with. I also brought some badly needed body armour for the medics supporting the troops who were pushing Russians out of the Kyiv region, which was one of the hottest spots at the time. The medics there were lacking bulletproof vests, and helmets, and were really grateful for my delivery.
Medics at the eastern frontline with some airway, intravenous access, and tactical medical kit that I delivered.
I also brought a few boxes of various airway kit, as well as cannulas for intravenous access, and needles for regional anaesthesia for local hospitals in Lviv. I had received a few specific requests from various hospitals that I was able to respond to. For example, a head of anaesthetic department in Vinnitsa, a big regional centre in the west of the country had asked for Isoflurane vaporisers, which is an anaesthetic gas in common use.
Isoflurane vaporisers in the boot of my car.
Their hospital had received a large shipment of Isoflurane but had no vaporisers to deliver it to their patients. I had managed to source four vaporisers with the help of our hospital’s engineering department. Basically, I bought the ones no longer in use due to an upgrade of our anaesthetic machines at a discounted price while they were on their way to a medical auction. The anaesthetists in Vinnitsa are now able to run four theatres using modern, and safe anaesthetic agents, which is a great result.
…and in the operating theatre in Vinnitsa being used as anaesthetise a combat trauma victim.
It is a good illustration of what my mission is all about – a small-scale personalised help, which makes a real difference for those in need.