The aftermath of the Russian aggression against Ukraine: “One day you come to the hospital and the next a grenade has fallen on you”

Vuhledar hospital rooms are littered with rubble.

The beds, some perfectly made, with their pink bedspreads, and others unmade, like when someone gets up in a hurry, remain covered with glass, plaster and dust.

"See?" says Nadia, a 38-year-old health worker, "this is what happens in war, that in the end people don't matter."

On Thursday, not long after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a "military operation in Donbas", an artillery attack hit the entrance road to this health center in the Donetsk region, some 60 kilometers from the area controlled by pro-Russian separatists and the Kremlin.

The projectiles hit a 50-year-old teacher, who was walking towards the hospital, and two cars.

The occupants of it, four, have died,

according to the head of the regional administration, Pavel Kirilenko.

The facade of the hospital, which serves an area already badly damaged by the nearly eight-year war between the Ukrainian army and secessionists, is now scarred.

Sixteen of the around 100 patients were injured by shards from window glass and pieces of wall.

The center, explains the doctor Natalia Nikolaevna, had to be evacuated.

“It doesn't have water and we just got the power back on,” she says.

Now, the building with its yellowish corridors and marble floors has become a makeshift shelter to escape the attacks that rage in the area at night.

The front line is close.

Yulia, a 28-year-old nurse —who, like most people since the crisis began, prefers not to say her last name—, doesn't know what to think.

"I'm still in

, but the truth is, what has to be will be," she says, about the advance of the troops sent by Putin and who are advancing almost relentlessly at strategic points in the country.

A wrecked car next to the Vuhledar hospital, in Donbas, after a bombing that caused four deaths.

What Putin announced as an operation in Donbas has in reality turned into a large-scale, swift and extremely aggressive attack across the country.

But in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions still controlled by the government, although there have been attacks and casualties, the situation is not as critical for now as in the capital, Kiev, or in the border area with Belarus.

Ukrainian and US intelligence services believe that Russian forces are trying to pin the area and engulf it, then fully annex the region claimed by the secessionists.

But Pavel, a 67-year-old retired teacher, believes Putin will no longer settle for Donbas alone.

"He won't stop," he says, sitting on one of the wooden benches in what until Thursday was the lobby of the Vuhledar hospital reception room.

“Who knows what will happen tomorrow.

One day you wake up, come to the hospital, and the next day a grenade has dropped on you,” she says.

This Friday, another projectile hit an old rehabilitation center that was now used by the army and set it on fire.

A sticky smell of burning permeates everything.

Like the feeling of waiting that engulfs much of the government-controlled Donetsk region.

In Vuhledar, the streets are almost empty and those who walk do so in a hurry.

What was important is not so important anymore, says Lena, 50.

She fled the city of Donetsk in 2014, when it passed into the hands of pro-Russian separatists raised by the Kremlin, and she settled in Vuhledar, with her mother and her husband, a former miner with a work injury.

She says that this time, if the city comes under Russian control, she will not leave.

She's tired.

“There comes a time when I think that what difference does it make if they are all the same”, she points out with a shrug.

On the roads of Donetsk there are hardly any cars heading east, towards Russia, towards the territory controlled by the secessionists.

Hundreds of citizens are pouring out of towns like Kostantinivka, which in Soviet times developed as a center of glass, iron, zinc and steel production.

Alexei has also put what he could in the car and has left his house.

He takes his neighbor and her three children in the vehicle, squeezed into the back seat.

In 2014, Kostantinivka was under separatist control for a few months, and Alexei says he does not want to experience it again.

“I did not leave yesterday [for Thursday], when the strong attacks began, because I was in

, but now it is clear that it is real.

Who stays is because he is foolish and doesn't care or because he is with them”, he says.

The river of cars on the precarious road from Kostantinivka to Dnipro is endless.

"Things are calm, still," says a driver, lowering the window, "for now, the city is ours, but who knows."

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