HERO medics have described their “daily battle with death” to save the lives of comrades butchered on Ukraine’s frontlines.
The Sun joined surgeons in a cellar as they performed life-saving operations while massive Russian airstrikes thundered through the night outside.
Ukraine’s frontline surgeons fight a daily battle to save the lives of wounded soldiers[/caption]
Ukrainian soldier Yurii, left, and former chef Andrii after being treated for their injuries[/caption]
Ukrainian soldier Captain Oleksii, 40, a former civilian surgeon, once performed open heart surgery in the cellar[/caption]
The field hospital in eastern Donbas is the first place troops are brought if they are hurt on the nearby frontline.
Mercifully all the patients we saw were expected to survive.
One was concussed with shrapnel buried in his back.
Surgeons gave him a local anaesthetic, pulled out a bean-sized shard of metal – with the help of a large magnet – and had him stitched up and out of theatre 15 minutes after he arrived.
The lead surgeon Dr Oleksii said: “We are fighting a battle with death every day.
“The best days are the days we win. It is always a pleasure to win that battle.”
Last year he performed open heart surgery and stitched together a still beating heart that had been sliced open by shrapnel.
He showed us a video of the procedure on his phone. A quick glance at his pictures showed a camera roll pink with gore.
Most of Oleksii’s patients are Ukrainian soldiers, but he also treats local civilians and “several Russian prisoners of war”.
He said he treated Russians “through gritted teeth” as there is growing evidence that it is a Russian policy to execute Ukrainians if they surrender on the battlefield.
Ukraine has documented at least 135 cases in 2024 alone. Most were filmed by surveillance drones.
Dr Oleksii said: “They are killing our PoWs, but they make it here to our hospitals and we are saving their lives.”
He said one Russian patient stood out in his memory: “He was telling me how much he loved Ukraine and how he was forced to come and fight us.”
Did he believe him? “No. To trust Russians is to cheat yourself.”
A Ukrainian soldier receiving treatment for a shrapnel wound[/caption]
Ukrainian paramedic Katya, 25, works in the underground operating theatre[/caption]
Dr Oleksii’s goal is to get every patient, whoever they are, in and out within an hour, so they can travel on to safer hospitals, further from the front for more advanced specialist care.
Of course, it is not always possible.
Hours before we arrived three soldiers died in an ambulance on their way to his stabilisation point.
The fourth arrived with severe head trauma, slipping in and out of consciousness.
The doctors managed to stabilise him but they are unsure if he will survive, or what quality of life he may have. He is only 26.
‘You can be broken quickly’
Katya, 25, a civilian volunteer, said they try not to get emotionally involved.
She said: “We don’t follow every patient’s story, you can’t always put those emotions through you. If you do it every time you will be broken very quickly.”
Katya was training to be a professional pianist at the Beethoven Institute in Vienna when Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full scale invasion of her homeland on Feb 24, 2022.
The war derailed her graduation because she refused to play the Russian music which she had planned for her final performance.
She said: “I used to love Russian music, but Russians were killing our writers, our composers and destroying our cultural legacy.”
Instead, she returned to Ukraine and trained as a combat medical corpsman, a US military standard.
There were many, many people killed in front of my eyes
Ukrainian soldier Yurii
The day we arrived she had been moved to tears by a soldier sobbing on the operating table.
Katya said: “We received a casualty who had been wounded 13 days earlier.
“He had shrapnel wounds, not critical. But he hadn’t been able to leave his position because there was no one to replace him.
“When he came he was very chilled, he was like, ‘I am already 13 days with these injuries’. He was really happy to drink a Fanta, eat some cake.
“Then he said, ‘I lost almost all of my team and now I am here.’
“It was like he had survivor’s guilt.
“He lay down on the operating table, the anaesthetist gave him a drip and antibiotics. I saw him staring at ceiling.
“He was blinking a lot. I realised he was was blinking because he was crying, silently.
“Finally, he says, ‘I am here and the suffering is over’.”
For the next few months, Katya said, “the war will be on pause for him” while he recovers.
Going underground
The Sun team spent a night with Oleksii, Katya and their colleagues underground.
We slept in short stretches, with the on-call team, in a corridor next to the operating theatres.
Dr Oleksii asked us not to reveal their location as the building has been bombed. A doctor was killed last autumn.
Throughout the night we heard explosions.
Russia started the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 – above, people paying their respects in Kyiv on the 3rd anniversary of the invasion[/caption]
Yurii, 52, described conditions on the front as ‘awful’ with soldiers sleeping on mats on the ground[/caption]
Then soon after dawn two soldiers arrived half-blinded by a hand grenade thrown into their trench in a Russian assault.
Yurii, 52, a grandfather of three, had bandages over his eyes but managed to describe what had happened.
He said: “It’s awful. The conditions in the front are awful.”
He said soldiers are sleeping in simple dugouts with no furniture, felled tree trunks for cover and earth walls buttressed sandbags.
He said: “We sleep on mats on the ground, in our sleeping bags.”
Temperatures at this time of year routinely plunge below minus 10 degrees Celsius and the medics routinely treat frostbite and trenchfoot.
Yurii said he had spent 16 days on the “zero line” closest to Russian positions when they attacked.
He said: “They attack two or three times a week.”
At the start of the war, three years ago, Ukraine’s troops routinely did three day stints on the zero line before rotating with comrades further back.
In August, when Yurii was drafted into the Army, time at the front had gone up to a week.
Now it has more than doubled again – he said 16 days was normal – as Ukraine struggles to cope with a chronic shortage of soldiers due to mounting battlefield losses.
Yurii, a tool maker in civilian life, said: “The front line is always changing.
“It is hard to say the Russians are here, the Ukrainians are there.
“It is fields and tree lines between us. Normally around 1km.”
The Sun’s Jerome Starkey has been given exclusive access to the unit[/caption]
Trump’s wild suggestion that the war was Ukraine’s fault was ‘worse than a betrayal’, one person said[/caption]
On Tuesday night a small group of three or four Russian soldiers crept across snow-covered fields to his bunker.
He said: “We were in a trench when the shooting started and a grenade exploded.
“We managed to repel the assault but my eyes were injured.
“It must have exploded really close and blasted dirt into our eyes.”
His comrade Andrii, 41, a chef in civilian life, was also hurt but less badly.
Trump talks a lot and always says different things. Our job is to save lives
Dr Oleksii
Medics rinsed their wounds and re-bandaged Yurii’s eyes. But nothing could stop him seeing the horrors he’d endured before.
At one point he touched his bandaged eyes and shook his head to clear a thought.
He said: “There were many, many people killed in front of my eyes.”
Dr Oleksii’s team of almost 50 medics work in a largely bombed out and abandoned settlement.
Despite their remote location they have super fast broadband internet via one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite terminals.
Had they heard the news? What did they think about Donald Trump’s wild claims that Ukraine had started the war?
At first Dr Oleksii he brushed it off with a joke: “News? When have I got time to read the news?”
He said he hadn’t taken a holiday since September 2022, when his wife and two young children moved to Italy for their safety.
But the troops and volunteers were acutely aware of America’s dizzying tilt towards Moscow.
One called it “worse than a betrayal”.
Dr Oleksii was more philosophical. He said: “Trump talks a lot and always says different things.”
He cautioned Trump not to trust Russia, then added: “Our job is to save lives.
“Whatever Trumps says and whoever he talks to, that is what we will keep working.”
