The eye covered with a bandage, Dima Kassianov is lying on his hospital bed in Kharkiv, unconscious. This 8-year-old boy was injured in the head by shrapnel from the Russian missile which destroyed the apartment where he lived.
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“During a bombardment, this boy was in his apartment in a ten-storey building” in the residential district of Saltivka, in the northeast of the city, told AFP Oleksandre Doukhovsky, director of the center community of pediatric neurosurgery.
AFP
On March 7, as Russian troops continued to shell Ukraine’s second-largest city, about 40 kilometers from the Russian border, a missile struck this Soviet-era building, turning Dima’s apartment into a charred hole.
A shrapnel “penetrated the upper jaw” of the boy before stopping “between the base of his skull and the vertebrae”, calmly details Mr. Doukhovsky, who has just operated on a 52-year-old man, also injured by a explosion.
“For two days, we evacuated ashes from his stomach. There are always ashes in his lungs”, continues the neurosurgeon, in a white suit and beige rubber gloves at the exit of an operating room. “His condition is stable, we are moving forward little by little.”
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, at least 78 children have been killed and more than 100 others injured, Ukrainian parliamentary representative for human rights Liudmyla Denisova said on Friday.
AFP
“The war in Ukraine poses an immediate and growing threat to the lives and well-being of the country’s 7.5 million children,” UNICEF said recently, according to which “more than one million ‘children fled’ to neighboring countries.
Near Dima’s bed, which is too big for him, a screen displays his vital parameters while a nurse comes to examine the condition of her little patient.
Upon entering the intensive care unit, where their son is being treated, his parents, Serguiï and Olena, brought medicines which are increasingly lacking in the country.
“We live in the hospital. Our apartment no longer exists,” says Olena. “We want to speak to the doctor to understand when we can transport him. Volunteers offered to take her to Germany to continue the treatment there,” she explains.
The Russian strike destroyed several apartments in their building on Krasnodarska Street, an AFP journalist noted.
AFP
In Dima’s, part of the floor collapsed, the rest is covered with debris. Water pours from a gaping hole in the ceiling and concrete blocks hang down, held in place by iron frames.
In the same hospital, Vova, another young boy who was shot in the head on February 26, has just been transferred from the intensive care unit to a normal room.
His father bends over his 7-year-old, whose head is covered with bandages, to give him something to drink using a syringe.
“We shot at our car from a (Ukrainian) checkpoint. My wife was killed and the (eldest) son injured, ”says the young man in a flat voice. “The three-year-old is fine, he is here, in the basement”, because the bombardments on Kharkiv do not stop, he continues.
“Vova had an open lesion in the brain and was immediately operated on,” explains Mr. Doukhovsky. “At first in extremely serious condition, he has already started talking and eating again and is gradually recovering.”
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca