A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, MAY 2 , 2022
but they raced him to the local
military hospital because it has
more experience with shrapnel-
related injuries. Ever-changing
blockades for military check-
points are another obstacle: The
ambulance driver expected to get
to the hospital down one road but
had to turn around and look for a
different way after running into
an unexpected barricade.
They made it in time. Sasha is
expected to live, albeit with part
of his right leg gone. Another
ambulance crew arrived at the
scene later to pick up the body of
the deceased man. He was the
city’s lone civilian fatality for the
day — considered a fairly quiet
day of war here.
“As much as you can, you get
used to this,” Yaremko said.
Back at the station, Mykytenko
carefully cleaned and disinfected
the inside of the car while Yarem-
ko filled out an incident report.
When she was done, she stood
with her hand at her hip and took
a deep breath. Just the one call
was exhausting, and her back
hurt.
She brushed her shoes against
a metal grate in front of the sta-
tion entrance — in case there was
still blood on them — and then
went inside to wait for the next
call.Maria Avdeeva contributed to this
report.hooked him up to morphine drip
to numb his pain and kept him
talking. All that time, parked in
the middle of a field with no cover
around, the medics themselves
were in the line of fire if another
round of bombardment started.
There’s always the risk of a “dou-
ble tap”: Russian forces tend to
strike the same place twice within
the hour, to finish off the target or
perhaps deliberately target first
responders.
“When you’re working, you
only think about the person
you’re treating,” Yaremko said.
“Of course, if we come under di-
rect shelling, we drive off to some-
where else. But if in the moment it
seems more or less calm, we do
what’s needed for the patient.
And then we get out of there.”
Ukraine’s first responders have
some of the most dangerous jobs
of this war. They’re not armed or
behind a fortified military posi-
tion. But for the past two months,
they’ve worked at the front lines
of battles with Russia, driving
into danger with nothing more
than a bulletproof vest to protect
themselves as they treat the
wounded.
The Washington Post shad-
owed a brigade of paramedics for
a 24-hour shift in Kharkiv, the
eastern Ukrainian city about 25
miles from the Russian border
MEDICS FROM A
added layer of danger to them.
But there are fewer calls for am-
bulances, too, because people are
often scared to leave their homes.
“Being afraid is normal,” Kole-
snyk said. “We’re afraid just like
normal people, but we have to
keep doing our job to save as
many people as possible.”
The paramedics are supersti-
tious about anyone wishing them
“good luck” before a run. Since the
start of the war, the World Health
Organization has reported at
least 175 attacks on health-care
facilities, including ambulances.
At the Kharkiv strike site
Wednesday night, the goal was for
Yaremko and Mykytenko to get
their patient to a hospital within
30 minutes of the call. As the
ambulance drove up to the apart-
ment block, residents directed it
to the back of the building.
Police who got to the scene first
told Yaremko the first man was
dead, so he went straight for
Sasha. In the ambulance, Yarem-
ko asked his patient whether he
could feel any pain.
“I don’t feel anything,” Sasha
responded.
“That’s good,” Yaremko said.
Sasha was a civilian casualty,23-year-old medical students
thrust into more action and re-
sponsibility.
Now they each have photos in
their phone of shrapnel they’ve
observed at places to which
they’ve been called.
“It was very tough at first,”
Anastacia Boldyr said. “I couldn’t
wrap my mind around the fact
that in the 21st century, some
crazy neighbor could just attack
you. But now you just go out every
time and think, ‘Who, if not you?’
Who will do this if we don’t?”
Those first days of the war were
daunting. Dmytro Kolesnyk, a
doctor, had calls to destroyed
apartment buildings where his
childhood friends lived. As he
tried to focus on treating the
wounded, he spotted the place
where he and his buddy sat and
had a beer together on a bench.
Except now the bench was gone,
and his friend’s home was de-
stroyed.
Nazar Marynychenko, also 23,
is still shaken by the shifts that
sent his ambulance directly into
shelling. Now even the most rou-
tine runs — to help an elderly
person with a minor ailment or
tend to a drunk person — have anit’s farthest from the fighting in
this eastern region. She scolded
him for not calling to let her know
he’s all right. He’s supposed to
check in every morning and every
night. She worries, he said.
“Our jobs have always been
dangerous and serious, even in
peacetime,” he said with a shrug.
Yaremko’s home is still stand-
ing, but the windows were shat-
tered from Russian artillery
strikes nearby. In the early days of
the war, he and others were living
at the ambulance station — sleep-
ing on creaky spring mattress
beds upstairs. He has since moved
to a friend’s house when he’s not
on duty.
He’s the veteran, steady hand at
this station. A former military
combat medic, Yaremko has ex-
perience from Ukraine’s 2014 con-
flict with Russia — war between
Kyiv’s forces and Russian-backed
separatists in eastern Ukraine’s
Donbas region. He tends to get
the tougher calls, as his col-
leagues have gotten younger since
the start of this war.
Many ambulance workers left
the city, moving to safer areas in
the country or out of it entirely.
That left a large contingent ofthat has been heavily battered by
airstrikes and artillery since the
first day of the war.
The sounds of incoming and
outgoing fire reverberated
around their ambulance station
all day. But Yaremko and
Mykytenko’s phones were silent
until almost 6:30 p.m., when they
got the call that dispatched their
ambulance toward the dark
smoke suddenly rising in the dis-
tance.
The shift started at 8 a.m. with
a lesson. The medics crowded into
the lobby of their ambulance sta-
tion for a demonstration of how to
properly apply a tourniquet. With
the number of catastrophic bleed-
ing cases they now face, the re-
fresher was needed.
The station dog, Zhuzha, lay
down in the middle of the room.
She’s a rescue pup, and the medics
say she can sense shelling, seek-
ing out a place to hide from the
loud blasts. Her collective mas-
ters don’t have that option.
Yaremko’s day starts with a dif-
ferent tradition — a call from his
wife. She, his two daughters and
two granddaughters are now in
western Ukraine, considered the
safest part of the country becauseIn Kharkiv, a 2 4-hour shift amid shelling
wAR IN uKRAINEPHOTOS BY NICOLE TUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP LEFT: First responder Stepan
Yaremko, left, prepares a portable stretcher
to transport a man injured in Russian
strikes on a Kharkiv neighborhood in
eastern Ukraine on Wednesday. O ne person
was killed in the strikes.
TOP RIGHT: Yaremko, back right, and his
colleague Natalia Mykytenko carry an
injured man to an ambulance.
ABOVE: In Kharkiv, an ambulance
responds to reports of casualties.
LEFT: Student medics gather before the
end of their 24-hour shift, while others
rotate in, at their ambulance station in
Kharkiv on Thursday.