Fleeing the horror of Bakhmut: a medicalized train transports the wounded and sick out of the city

The war drives spirals of pain that become endless.

A pain that travels on a train that marks the tracks of Ukraine with passengers on a stretcher that put a face on the war tragedy.

These days, thirty of these squares are covered by residents fleeing the Russian siege of Bakhmut, such as Yuri Chucha, 52, who is leaving the besieged city on this hospital train that evacuates the wounded and sick from the eastern and southern fronts. from Ukraine to a safe area.

On March 22 of last year, in the early stages of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yuri and his 48-year-old wife, Ana, lost contact with their only child.

Alexei, 27, was fighting Kremlin troops in Mariupol.

After the bloodiest battle of the conflict, that city, on the shores of the Azov Sea, fell into Russian hands.

Sorrowful, but without breaking down, Ana tells on board the train that the only thing they have received since then is a cold message on their mobile phone in which someone anonymously offers their condolences.

There is no trace of Alexei's body.

She strokes her husband's hand as she patiently tries to get him to eat.

Between spoonful and spoonful, without any hurry, Yuri turns his face and loses his sight through the improvised screen that is the window of the wagon.

The man lies on one of the stretchers anchored to the ground on the train.

To the nightmare of the bloody combats in the Bakhmut district, where this family lived, and to the drama of not even being able to bury his son, now joins the stomach cancer that Yuri has been detected.

The first medicalized train in the world that operates in a war zone is managed by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and was launched on March 28 of last year.

During this time, almost 2,800 patients have been transferred ―some along with their pets― from the areas hardest hit by the Russian invasion.

An emergency operation for peritonitis on February 9 was the one that helped the doctors detect that this was not the most serious thing that Yuri suffers, who shrugs his shoulders when asked where they are taking him.

It is his wife who answers that they will get off at the Jemelnitski station, west of kyiv, where Yuri will be admitted to the oncology unit of the hospital in that city.

In another of the carriages, Valentina Berezhnaya, 75, dries up her sentences by responding at length to the reporter.

She feels a certain shame that they are going to read her testimony in a Spanish newspaper, but her loquacity is above that modesty.

She covers her face at first, but eventually she too agrees to be photographed.

It was one year since the Russian invasion on a large scale when, on February 24, a new attack shook Bakhmut.

Valentina lived in the little house that many Ukrainians have in the garden and that they call the summer kitchen.

Her home, built by her parents, had already been destroyed on September 24.

And with her, her husband, Vasili, also 75 years old, who died from a shrapnel that, at first, she thought had not done much damage.

She was wrong.

"He died in front of me, very quickly," she recounts.

“I couldn't even go to the funeral, which was held in the midst of bombardments.

I don't know where his grave is, ”he adds.

Valentina Berezhnaya, 75, in the hospital train of the NGO Doctors Without Borders after being injured on February 24 in the same house in Bakhmut where her husband died last September.Luis De Vega

Despite everything, despite being incommunicado, despite not having water, electricity, or heating, the woman refused to leave.

"Why do I have to leave my house, my land, where I grew up...?", she defends.

On February 24, Berezhnaya miraculously saved her life.

Debris from her broke her left hip and left her leg badly battered.

“I dragged myself for more than 100 meters to a neighbor's house and from there the next day some very kind soldiers took me out,” she recounts.

The cat, Venia, escaped, but the dog, Dick, thinks he was buried there.

The evacuation of the city was movie.

A Russian drone flew overhead and they changed vehicles up to five times before reaching the Ruskivka hospital.

"Bajmut is a scary movie," says Berezhnaya of that town in the eastern region of Donetsk, which has been besieged for months by invading troops and where barely 4,000 of its 70,000 inhabitants remain.

“I don't believe this is happening to us.

I ask for humanity, that they do not continue killing us, ”she implores as she gesticulates with her hands from the stretcher amid the rattle of the train that takes her to Jemelnitski, like Yuri, although she complains that she does not know anyone there.

"Nobody is ready for this, that's why so many people come to us without hope and without faith," argues 36-year-old Dr. Boris Potapov, who until last year worked as an assistant in implanting prostheses and now travels on the commuter train. MSF.

Leading the fifteen-person team is Albina Zharkova, 36, who until the full-scale Russian invasion began taught at the Sumi University Medical School.

On board from day one, she does not rule out leaving the classroom behind permanently and staying in the humanitarian sector.

“If it weren't for the fact that all this is happening in my country, I would say I'm happy,” she says, sitting on the bunk in one of the compartments.

Everything, despite the fact that there are moments in which she has had to suffer, such as when they arrived at the Kramatorsk station on April 9,

A wounded civilian in the besieged town of Bakhmut is evacuated from the Dnipro station in eastern Ukraine.Luis De Vega

In the first expedition this week, the MSF train has experienced a relay among those who make up its health personnel.

Australian nurse Holli Houttin, 26, has left her place to her Swedish colleague Fredrik Ström, 50. She says goodbye, after three months, to her first mission with this humanitarian organization.

She doesn't know how many more trips the train will make, but she suspects Ukrainians' mental health will take longer to recover than physical injuries.

Ström, for his part, already knows what it is to work for them in various missions on the African continent.

Houttin returns to her city, Victoria, with the memory of the refugees she saw arriving at the train with the only thing they had saved: “her life and a few things stuffed into a black garbage bag”.

The convoy, made up of eight wagons and one locomotive and belonging to the National Railway Company of Ukraine (Ukrzaliznytsia), has been completely rehabilitated.

It has a car with a huge electricity generator, another to produce oxygen, four with beds ―including a wagon as an Intensive Care Unit (ICU)―, another for companions and one more for the staff.

MSF manages what is considered the first medicalized train in history in a war zone and works hand in hand with the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.

Its base is in Lviv, the great city of the west, near Poland, from where the railwayman Ivan Nakvatskyi, head of the convoy, already operated before the great Russian invasion.

Ivan Nakvatskyi (right), 53, is the head of the Ukrainian railway company in charge of the hospital train operated by the NGO Doctors Without Borders.

Luis Vega

This 53-year-old man came to Ukrzaliznytsia in 1991, a year before Ukraine broke away from the USSR.

Attending the evacuation of Kherson in the midst of the Russian attacks last November, even though he was accompanying the health workers, was a challenge for him.

As he watches the landscape pass by through the window, he acknowledges that these months have helped him gain patience, remain more calm and listen to travelers without stressing them in the midst of "very complicated situations."

Both he and Albina Zharkova appreciate the possibility of receiving permanent psychological care.

Despite the chaos of his trips to the troubled east of the country in the first weeks of the invasion, Nakvatskyi has never thought of leaving his job.

Minutes after attending the reporter,

After more than 20 hours of travel, the entrance of the train this Tuesday to the Pokrovsk station (in the Donetsk province) coincides with the sound of the alarms.

Pokrovsk is the closest stop to Bakhmut that the train can still reach (there are about 70 kilometers between the two towns).

Several explosions rumble from the launch of missiles from the Russian side and the activation of the local air defense.

Newcomer Fredrik Ström observes the operation in detail using platforms to lift stretchers and wheelchairs with patients onto the wagons.

Another group of wounded joins the evacuation in Dnipro, with the convoy already moving back into western Ukraine.

The Swedish nurse breaks out laughing when, between jokes, they tell him that with those blows they are honoring him on his first visit to Pokrovsk.

Nothing alters, however,

An ambulance transfers a patient at the Dnipro station to the hospital train of the NGO Doctors Without Borders.

Luis Vega

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