“We asked the Russians for medicine for diabetes, we got gauze and a bandage”: Ukrainians told about medicine in the occupation
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Until the Ukrainian military liberated Kherson on November 11, there were restrictions on movement in the then still Russian-occupied city and region. For months, people who needed medical help were not allowed to leave their streets. This is stated in the report of the international humanitarian mission “Doctors without borders” (Médecins Sans Frontières), which provides assistance to war victims. A 65-year-old resident of the village of Borozenske in the Kherson region told medics that the local dispensary was damaged, so she had to take her husband through 12 roadblocks for an emergency consultation. In May 2022, a man slipped from a ladder and injured his leg. “We contacted a doctor who used to work at the polyclinic, but he couldn’t help us in any way – he didn’t have any medicine or equipment, so he recommended us to go to the Beryslav hospital. It’s 50 kilometers from Borozensky, and we need “I had to go through 12 Russian checkpoints to get to the hospital,” the woman said. According to her, access to health care during the occupation was not a priority for people unless it was a matter of life and death. The organization’s report states that many patients had to turn to the occupying “authorities” for help and medicine not only in the Kherson region, but also in other occupied regions. A doctor from the Mykolayiv region said that when the Russian troops entered the city, there were only a few doctors and nurses left in the medical facility. There was no surgeon in the hospital, but people with shrapnel wounds arrived every day. According to the doctor, when medical supplies ran out, they began to be reused. Most of the people seeking help were elderly and had chronic diseases, so there was a shortage of medicines for patients with diabetes and high blood pressure. As a result, relevant requests were addressed to the occupying “authorities”. However, it was unable to provide everything necessary for survival to the people they came to “liberate”. “Once the Russians said to us, ‘Write a list of medicines, we will give you everything.'” There were 86 items on the list, and we were given only 16 – bandages, gauze, oilcloth, cannulas, syringes and some medicines, such as painkillers and anti-inflammatories. I asked them: “How should I treat, for example, hypertension or diabetes?” – recalls a doctor from the Mykolaiv region. Some people were refused help altogether. Doctors who previously lived in the territories occupied by the Russian Federation told “Doctors without Borders” about intimidation, detention, the violence and ill-treatment they suffered at the hands of the occupiers. For example, in the Mykolaiv Oblast, the invaders came to the doctor’s home to arrest him. The man was taken to the “administrative department” where they were interrogated for two hours and demanded that the hospital staff cooperate with them. “They beat me . They ordered to stop speaking Ukrainian. In the end I was released, but a week later the soldiers returned, already to the hospital. I was handcuffed in front of all the hospital staff. They forcibly put me in a car and took me to the basement of my house, where they beat me again,” the doctor said. From November 15, 2022 to February 19, 2023, Doctors Without Borders conducted about 11,000 medical consultations in cities and villages of Donetsk and Kherson regions regions previously occupied by Russia. Also, from November 2022 to January 2023, the organization interviewed 48 patients and medical workers. Read also: How people are rescued from the east and why they did not evacuate the wounded from “Azovstal”. Interview with the coordinator of “Doctors without borders”
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