In the basement of the main pediatric hospital in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, mothers and fathers comfort 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 in the home, they cannot survive without medicines, without medical treatment and medical workers“, the chief surgeon of the hospital, 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.
Normally has up to 549 patients, but that number is now around 200, reported the Reuters agency.
The World Organization for Health said on Sunday that Ukrainian hospitals aren running out of oxygen.
“The oxygen supply situation is approaching a very dangerous point in Ukraine”, WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and the WHO regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge.
Trucks cannot transport oxygen supplies from plants to hospitals throughout the country, including the capital , Kiev.
The images below are a window into the daily reality in the Kiev children’s hospital, which received journalists on Monday.
As of Monday, four children had been treated for shrapnel and gunshot wounds, victi more bombings and clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces. One of them was seriously ill
The Office of the High Commissioner for the UN for Human Rights, OHCHR for its acronym in English, reported on March 1 that between the beginning of the invasion the 19 February and midnight on 28 of February had registered “77 civilian deaths, 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 airstrikes,” OHCHR added in a statement.
“These are only the casualties that we were able to verify, and it is likely that the real number is much higher“, he clarified.
Not all of them 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 they get injured, what do we do, who is going to take care of the 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 Where to buy children’s insulin, pharmacies are not open,” said Zhovnir, the chief surgeon.
The hospital normally treats six to seven children a day for common ailments such as appendicitis, but that number has drastically reduced.
“No they may have disappeared, they just can’t come here“, added Zhovnir.
The situation is equally desperate in other hospitals in the country, such as that of Chernihiv, about 66 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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