A ‘terrible nightmare’: Treating Ukraine’s wounded civilians

In wheelchairs and on stretchers, in ambulances and on train station platforms, they wait. Medical workers pull out ramps and wheel the patients onto the specially equipped train that will carry them westwards, away from the fighting raging in eastern Ukraine.

Run by the aid organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the train is a lifeline for the overwhelmed hospitals in cities and towns near Ukraine's front lines that are struggling to cope with an influx of war wounded on top of their usual flow of sick patients.

"Since the beginning of the war, the hospital capacity in the east is under pressure," said Yasser Kamaledin, MSF's emergency project coordinator for the medical evacuation train, which includes an intensive care unit.

"The idea of this activity is to support the hospitals that are closer to the front line, to empty some bed capacity so they can receive more patients from the attacks, the conflict, but also other chronic patients," Kamaledin said.

Since it started running on March 31, the train has ferried nearly 600 people to hospitals in safer areas of western Ukraine, he said, including around 30 more people on Sunday.

They included 40-year-old Mykola Pastukh. He was wounded Saturday near Sievierodonetsk by a mortar shell that landed as he tried to ferry humanitarian aid into the city, which has been under fierce attack as Russian forces intensify their efforts to seize Ukrainian territory in the east.

There was still shrapnel inside him, he said as he stood on the train platform nursing his right arm in a sling under his shirt.

He needed surgery but the hospital in Lysychansk, a city close to Sievierodonetsk that was also under fierce Russian attack, just couldn't cope. So he...