There is a maxim in any triage process in a field hospital: if you can still scream, you're not so bad off because those who require immediate medical attention are the ones who no longer complain. However, Vasil breaks that rule because he can still scream, even if it's with a painful thread of a voice, while he has a breath of life left. Malnourished and dehydrated, with a face and hands blackened by smoke and dirt, he looks at some undefined point in the room with eyes red from exhaustion as if he were seeing the devil while muttering something unintelligible to the nurse. They cut off his combat clothing, already stiff, and the body odor that corresponds to not having showered for weeks emerges. Some nurses put on masks or hang an air freshener ball around their necks. Hell stinks.
We don't know his military unit, but we are told that this man comes from the front line and has been fighting there for months without relief. He has wounds all over his right side, as if he had been sprayed with shrapnel. They try to ask him what caused those burns and lacerations, but all he repeats is his name. Vasil, Vasil. Vasil. His face tells more about real war than any military library.
He wears a wedding ring, and we wonder if his wife, if his family imagines that their loved one, a man who should be at home, dedicated to what he did before Putin's invasion, is subjected to these inhuman conditions. Not only because of the wounds, but because of the pain reflected in his gaze, a gaze that has tasted horror in sips.
We are in the early hours of the new Russian offensive, in the hottest spot on the front. The villages near the front line remain silent and without light. Here, only these evacuation points operate, taking advantage of the night to transport the wounded and receive medical attention. Crackling radios report that new wounded are arriving and they must be prepared. They give us 48 hours to tell this story in two different hospitals and with two conditions: one, not to hinder the staff. The other, not to reveal the locations. "Do you want to see real war? Well, this is the place and this is the moment," says Sergii, a doctor who never loses his smile, even in this meat grinder.
A Russian tank fired at the position Anatoli was defending at 9:00 in the morning. A piece of shrapnel the size of a marble penetrated his helmet, fractured his skull, and tried to lodge in the outer layer of his brain, pressing down on his meninges and brain mass. His comrades made a makeshift bandage for him, and he continued to fight, as it was the only thing he could do. Now they remove the bandage 12 hours after that tank shot, already dirty and with dried blood, revealing the hole in his head. A doctor asks him his name and what happened, but he has to do it loudly because the explosion has left him almost deaf. "My name is Anatoli, I am 48 years old, and I am from Zaporiyia!," he shouts. To the surprise of those present and despite possible brain injuries, he stands up on his own. Lazarus, rise and walk.
"Here evacuations are done at night. There is no way to bring a wounded person in broad daylight. Everyone knows that," says the chief medical officer of the Da Vinci Wolves battalion, the charismatic Captain Alina Mijailova, widow of Mijailo Kutsibailo, alias Da Vinci, decorated by Zelenski as "Hero of Ukraine."
- Alina, how does this affect you personally?
- I don't know. I have lost the ability to measure my own psychological wound. I am broken inside and can no longer do anything else.
Hospital forklift loading wounded.ALBERTO ROJAS
We arrive at this small patient stabilization point just as the wounded begin to arrive. Ambulance after ambulance, Volodimir Saykň, a pediatrician before the war and tireless smoker, prepares for a long night of work: "Yesterday we had more than 100 people to attend to, and today we expect more. The medical team is exhausted, but we try to maintain a good mood. In all my time in the war, I had never seen so many arrivals in so few hours." A group of military chaplains in uniform waits, drinking coffee in a hallway. They will calm the wounded, read them a passage from the Bible, try to comfort them, and, if necessary, administer the last rites to the dying.
Vladimir Putin has ordered to accelerate all operations while Trump has failed in his chaotic attempt at pacification. The Kremlin's renewed goal is to reach the border separating the regions of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, three kilometers from the front. For this purpose, they have launched waves of Russians against anything that can move: motorcycles, golf carts, electric scooters... They seek to move fast, escape from Ukrainian drone swarms, and take Ukrainian positions in destroyed villages at any cost, and that cost is very high. They know it in stabilization points like this, and the coffin makers on both sides of the combat line know it. Sergii assures that he has also had to attend to captured Russian soldiers. "I do it because I convince myself that if I heal him, that Russian will later be exchanged for a Ukrainian," he justifies.
Meanwhile, the doctors are rewriting the literature dedicated to military medicine these days. "Most wounds are from drones and are usually less severe than those caused by artillery or bullets, but there is a problem: the impossibility of moving the wounded until dawn causes legs or arms with tourniquets to gangrene and require amputation," comments Dimitro, a doctor who remains undisturbed in the face of the desolate panorama that lies ahead as the night progresses.
Yaroslav no longer walks. His body has come out of shock, the adrenaline that sustained him has subsided, and his legs no longer respond. A drone exploded next to him, filling his right side with shrapnel. Natalia, a nurse who never studied to be a nurse, removes his pants, stained red with blood and torn, and cleans his blackened face. Tired of seeing open flesh and coagulated blood, we have to go out to breathe in the middle of the night without lights, where we can hear the nearby front. Everything smells of smoke, burnt rubber, garbage, and brick dust. It's a smell of war that is chewed between the teeth. Doctor Saykň smokes one cigarette after another. His glowing ash is the only light of the night.
Poisoned by Propaganda
When talking about casualties in a war, a distinction is always made between civilians and military personnel, between adult men on one side, and women, elderly, and children on the other. The death of the former is seen as a lesser evil, but the latter are always considered intolerable victims. Do these men who arrive on stretchers, with bloodstained uniforms, not have a life, loved ones, or dreams? What about those on the other side? Did the Russian soldiers, even those poisoned by the propaganda and lies of Putin's regime, not deserve to live their lives in peace instead of coming to die, abandoned, in a remote and destroyed village in Donetsk? We return once again inside the hospital. "Here you don't come to report on the war, but to immerse yourself in it," says Dr. Saykň to me.
For them, the front is no longer a place, but a mental state where death is routine and where no one wants to return. Olec has a vacant look, like a sleepwalker. Some of these soldiers no longer fully return from the trenches. They remain lost because there are places you don't come back from. Olec listens and responds, but he is not the same anymore. His soul has been scorched. His companion, on the other hand, is jubilant. Out of all possible shrapnel, he only got a graze on his leg. "I've been on the front for eight months, and today is the happiest day of my damn life. Finally, I'm leaving this hellhole," he says with a smile. They are hardened and brutalized men who curse terribly to mock death after staring it in the face. They are all subjected to the drone routine: not to leave the trench under any circumstances, not even to relieve themselves, which is done in bags inside the trench.
The nurses choose civilian clothing donated for them, undress them, clean off the grime with damp towels, and collect their personal effects. Some items stay on their bodies, like identification tags or a wristwatch. Others fall out of their uniform pockets: a can opener, a knife, a bar of soap, a photo of the soldier with his wife and children in peacetime, a mobile phone, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter with the trident of Ukraine engraved on the metal shining on the dirty flesh. It is the meager luggage of those who may die.
Two soldiers arrive feeling dizzy. Hours ago, the Russians threw poisonous gas grenades at them, like those used in World War I, and they have sky-high blood pressure. Both have difficulty breathing, a strong headache, and appear disoriented. Their blood pressure and pulse are taken. One of them has a heart rate of 180 beats per minute while lying down, on the verge of a heart attack.
Stakhanovite Rotation
Another comrade has a bullet wound in his hand, something increasingly rare to see because there are hardly any face-to-face confrontations, soldier to soldier. "We shot at each other almost at the same time. The Russian did this to me, although I didn't see what I did to him because I threw a grenade and ran," says Sasha, whose skin is gray but responsive. "I have two fingers hanging by the tendons. It's curious, I got hit in the same hand that was wounded a few months ago," he comments with a pained expression. He cries, and the tears carve two clean streaks on his dirty face.
The doctor quickly bandages him up to last until the next hospital, where he will need surgery to reconstruct his hand. The operating rooms operate 24/7 in a Stakhanovite rotation. It's unlikely that Sasha will return to combat. The war is over for him.
"There are soldiers who arrive several days after being wounded. Yesterday we treated a soldier who had been with a tourniquet on his arm for four days," says Saykň, showing us the photo. The arm shows a gray color of dead flesh. "It's clear that he already had gangrene, and only amputation was left. The tourniquet didn't save his arm, but it saved his life."
The Special Military Operation that was supposed to last three days has now extended into its fourth year while Donald Trump, who promised to end it in 24 hours, now washes his hands of it and leaves peace in the hands of the new Pope. The U.S. is neglecting all commitments made by its own country to preserve the sovereignty of Ukraine, and Europe continues to drag its feet in an invasion happening at its doorstep. But the Ukrainian people fight for every inch of their land. Soldiers over 50 forcibly recruited mix with volunteer twenty-year-olds in a herculean effort to maintain strategic positions in places where there are a thousand things that can kill you and weapons of all calibers trying to do so. These are the men we see in the hospital today. There is no epic here, no victory, no medals. There is only the smell of sweat, a palpable fear, and tired personnel.
Drones have somewhat alleviated the always pressing shortage of ammunition and, above all, the lack of infantry soldiers to defend all positions on the front. The robotization of the battlefield represents, according to Commander Olexander Yabchanka of the Honor battalion, "the greatest military revolution since the invention of gunpowder." Ukraine is ahead of the Russians, but every innovation is copied days later by Moscow's engineers.
A Theater from Moscow
According to Ukrainian intelligence services, while the Kremlin theatrically pretends to be interested in peace to keep Trump hooked on his own lie, Moscow is seizing the opportunity to prepare for new major offensives for the summer. At this point on the front, they have already begun. Putin, directing the war himself like Adolf Hitler despite not being a military man, decorates generals daily, meets with widows of soldiers selected by his collaborators who "thank" him for sending their husbands to die on the front lines, and diverts more and more funds towards the military industry, which is already the locomotive driving the ailing Russian economy. Putin, who has become addicted to war like a junkie, failed to conquer Ukraine in three days but succeeded in poisoning the White House in three months.
The Russian press says these days: "The unity of the West has faded. Geopolitically, it is no longer an alliance. Trumpism has destroyed the Atlantic consensus with certainty and speed." In Moscow, they rub their hands together while on both sides, they display panels covering buildings with the image of heroic fighters defending their homeland to continue recruiting. There is an essential difference between them: only one tells the truth, only one is forced to defend against the aggression of the other. It is a fight to the death to maintain positions dug into the black earth where sometimes hundreds of men are sacrificed for the imperial vengeance of an embittered old spy.
No one knows the real number of casualties in the war, but the most reliable estimates place Ukraine's at around 600,000 between wounded, dead, and missing, and about 950,000 in the case of Russia, figures not seen since the Vietnam War.
Writer Michael Hopf defines this process with his theory of the cycle: "Hard times create strong men; strong men create easy times; easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Are these soldiers then the result of hard times?
Outside the hospital, a refrigerated truck with the sign "Cargo 200," meaning the code for the deceased, waits with the engine running.