The hospital gurney on which Valeriy is carried into the operating room is shaped like a cross. Cloth ties each arm loosely to the perpendicular extensions. The 52-year-old has been shot in the abdomen. Now it’s time to clean his wound.
“He is lucky in a way, the bullet missed his vital organs,” explains Dr Khassan El-Kafarna, a 27-year-old surgeon at the hospital in Kostiantynivka. “The problem is the wound was not clean when he arrived; he spent three days in Bakhmut managing it on his own.”
Across the roughly 600-mile frontline there are pockets of civilians living through the deadliest fighting in Europe since the Second World War.
