How Okhmatdyt children's hospital saves young Ukrainians wounded during war

According to Okhmatdyt, wounded children and adults are now admitted here. Seriously ill patients remain in bomb shelters for days.

"Wounded children, who saw how their parents were killed, are brought to us. Elderly people, whose homes were destroyed in rocket attacks, are brought to us. Injured civilians are brought to us,” the report says.

13-year-old Vova war brought to Okhmatdyt on February 26. He and his family were trying to leave Kyiv in the car that came under fire. The boy's father and his 6-year-old brother died on the spot.

Vova has gunshot and explosive injury of the right half of the face, gunshot-fragment open fracture of the lower jaw, fragmentary fracture of the right chin-orbital complex. The boy underwent a number of complex surgeries. He will need a long rehabilitation to fully recover.

6-year-old Milana saw her mother was killed on February 28, as a Russian rocket hit their house near Hostomel.

The fragments damaged the girl's lower extremities.

7-year-old Varia from Irpin and her family tried to leave their hometown, which is constantly being shelled by the Russian military. The occupiers began attacking civilians with mortars.

Varia and her mother received severe shrapnel wounds. Their legs were severely injured.

In early hours of March 18, a family of wounded Kyiv residents was brought in Okhmatdyt. Dmytro and Olha were feeding their one-month-old daughter Viktoria when an enemy shell landed near their five-storey residential building. The kids managed to survive and were not injured, because their mother covered them with her own body. As a result, Olha got numerous shrapnel wounds. Legs of her husband were seriously wounded.

On March 17, 14-year-old Yura and his father went to the center of occupied Bucha for humanitarian aid and medicines.

"We were riding bicycles when the Russian military came out of the house. We stopped, raised our hands, said we had no weapons. But the soldier started shooting at my father. He fell. Then the military started firing at me, two bullets hit my hand. I fell to the ground. The soldier still fired into the hood, but the bullet did not hit my head," Yura said.

According to data provided by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office, as of the morning of the 31st day of full-scale armed aggression by the Russian Federation, 136 children were killed and 199 children were injured in Ukraine. The highest number of child casualties was recorded in the Kyiv region - 64, the Kharkiv region - 44, the Donetsk region - 50, the Chernihiv region - 38, the Mykolaiv region - 28, the Luhansk region - 25, the Zaporizhzhia region - 17, the Kherson region - 20, Kyiv city - 16, the Zhytomyr region - 15, and the Sumy region – 14.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops have been shelling and destroying key infrastructure facilities, conducting massive shelling of residential areas of Ukrainian cities and villages using artillery, multiple rocket launchers and ballistic missiles.

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