“We cannot take light or moderate patients, which leads to conflicts: calls to hotlines, calls to deputies. But your social status and money aren’t important here. We’ll still take someone who really needs oxygen.”
It’s the evening of 2 April. I’m sitting in my kitchen in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and talking to Ivan Chernenko, an anaesthesiologist some 300 miles to the south in the port city of Odesa. He’s on duty now, at the central regional hospital, and there’s less work, he says, after five pm.
That said, our interview is interrupted several times as Chernenko needs to tend to his patients. “I have to answer them, wait a minute,” he says and hangs up.
