In the basement of the main pediatric hospital in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, mothers and fathers console their children as best they can, doing their best to hide their feelings of horror and disbelief from their children.
For these families, fleeing the city is not an option.
“These are patients who cannot receive medical treatment at home, they cannot survive without medication, without medical treatment and medical workers “, the hospital’s chief surgeon, Volodymyr Zhovnir, told the press.
The hospital, called Okhmatdyt, is the largest of its kind in the country and specializes in treating children with cancer.
Usually has up to 600 patients, but that number is now from to around 35, reported the Reuters agency.
The World Health Organization said Sunday that Ukrainian hospitals are running out of oxygen.
“The The oxygen supply situation is approaching a very dangerous point in Ukraine,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge said in a statement.
The trucks they are unable to transport oxygen supplies from plants to hospitals across the country, including the capital Kiev.
The images below are a window into daily reality at the Kiev children’s hospital , which received journalists on Monday.
As of Monday, four children had been treated for shrapnel and gunshot wounds, victims of shelling and clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces. One of them was in serious condition.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR for its acronym in English, reported on March 1 that between the start of the invasion on 13 February and midnight on 28 of February had registered “150 civilians killed , of which 13 were children, and 400 injured civilians, including 26 children”.
“Most of these recorded casualties were due to the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including heavy artillery shelling and multiple rocket launch systems, and air strikes,” OHCHR added in a statement.
“These are only the casualties we were able to verify, and it is likely that the number real is much higher“, he clarified.
Not all can be moved to the basement. Patients in intensive care who cannot move have been placed in the least vulnerable areas of the building.
“You also have to take care of the staff, because if they die or are injured, what do we do, who are you going to treat patients?“, a surgeon, Valery Bovkun, told Reuters.
“Of all things, what we need most is peace… all this is the tip of an iceberg… people, for example, ask me where to buy children’s insulin, pharmacies are not open,” said Zhovnir, the chief surgeon.
The hospital it normally treats six to seven children a day for common ailments like appendicitis, but that number has dropped dramatically.
“They can’t be gone, they just can’t come here,” Zhovnir added.
The situation is equally desperate in other hospitals in the country, such as the one in Chernihiv, about 150 km from Kiev, where explosives scattered in the streets mean that children requiring cancer treatment could only be evacuated by helicopter, according to news reports.
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