Facts: Doctors Without Borders in Ukraine
Currently, the aid organization has around 124 international employees in Ukraine who work together with around 686 local employees.
Millions of people are in need of support across Ukraine. In addition to IDPs, who live in precarious conditions, there are many other vulnerable groups such as the elderly and people with disabilities who remain in their homes.
Many live in basements in cramped conditions without electricity, fresh water, food, toilets or medical care. Mental illness is also a big problem.
In cooperation with Ukrainian Railways, MSF has equipped two trains with medical capacity to evacuate patients from conflict zones to safer places where they can receive the necessary care.
Source: Doctors Without Borders
Rolling cornfields replaced by cemeteries with freshly dug graves. A woman and a little girl standing and crying at a railway station. Perhaps they had just been separated from a relative who had been sent away to battle. Some memories have been etched with particular sharpness, says Peter Moberger, who has recently returned from the town of Kostiantynivka, one and a half miles from the front lines of the war.
— That woman and that five-year-old girl became such a clear image for me that it is not only the soldiers who are sent to war who suffer. It is such an incredible suffering for the whole community, with relatives missing and grieving.
Only civilian hospital
As it is not possible to fly, Peter Moberger traveled the 16-hour journey by train, from Lviv in the west to the hospital in Kostiantynivka in Donetsk in the eastern parts of Ukraine.
— It is the only civilian hospital and serves the entire region. In addition to those injured in the war, we also had all the patients with other needs for care, above all those suffering from chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases or diabetes which are common.
The surgeon Peter Moberger worked at the Kostiantynivka hospital which, among other things, received wounded from the heavily contested town of Bachmut.
As a surgeon in the field, Peter Moberger has extensive experience from conflicts, disasters and epidemics. He is Swedish chairman of Doctors Without Borders and has been to Darfur, Mosul, Yemen and Liberia, among others.
— What stands out in this conflict is the magnitude and indiscriminateness, where hundreds of people on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides die every day. It is clear that being part of the biggest war that Europe has experienced since the Second World War affects one.
In the midst of great tragedy, as a doctor he has been impressed many times by the strength and endurance of the patients he has met.
— An 80-year-old woman who came from Bachmut had one of her feet torn apart by shrapnel. The other foot was broken. It turned out that with her severe injuries, she had been hiding in a basement for over two weeks before the military could send her to our hospital. Miraculously, she had not suffered from infections, says Peter Moberger.
A kind of everyday life
Despite the war, life seems to go on as usual and a kind of everyday life is maintained. People go to the store to shop, cycle around the streets and children play in the playgrounds. But when darkness falls, you notice how many windows remain unlit, only in some of them do you see the lights turn on.
An estimated 30,000 people have left Kostiantynivka, out of the town’s original population of 70,000. And for those who stay, life must go on, notes Peter Moberger.
— The state of war becomes part of everyday life. At the same time, everyone I’ve spoken to says they think about the war, every day.