Children are born under Russian missile attacks. Life stories through the eyes of a surgeon from the Kherson maternity hospital

"The enemy continues to destroy the Kherson region. Now a Russian projectile hit the maternity hospital, after which the building caught fire. A powerful blast wave broke the windows in the children's department and damaged one of the doctors' offices.

This is the first news on the website of the A municipally owned corporation "Kherson City Perinatal Center of Level II named after Z. Klymenko" in January 2023.

Direct hits of Russian shells in the delivery room. This happened twice. On January 11 and 24, 2023, the pathology department and the department for premature babies were completely destroyed.

However, the maternity ward was not closed for a single day during the full-scale invasion. Under daily rocket attacks and shelling, medics give birth to a woman in labor and operate in the basement. Stories from the life of the Kherson maternity center are told by surgeon and deputy director of the perinatal center Svitlana Kulinich, who has been in Kherson since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

Until February 24, 2022, the Kherson City Perinatal Center was the leading maternity center. During the year, there were about 100,000 female patients from the city and region. In addition, more than 1,000 births and 2,500 gynecological operations took place at this center.

"The war caught us by surprise. We heard that Russia was planning to attack us, but we didn't want to believe it. How can this happen? Now it's the XXI century! Will Europe allow a war to break out on its borders? The morning of February 24 came. I heard shooting and explosions, but still stubbornly did not believe that a war had begun. I believed only when the battles for the Antonivskyi Bridge began, and 30 young men died in the Lilac Park... 30 young lives. Then there was the occupation," recalls Svitlana Kulinich.

Occupation

The occupiers invaded all areas of the city's life. Of course, they began to change the leadership of the maternity hospital. "Our medical director actively campaigned to cooperate with the "new government". The team resisted the management as best they could. Most of the doctors simply left the city. The remaining doctors did it for the sake of the Kherson people. I could not work under the leadership of supporters of the "liberators". I was not directly threatened, but I knew that they told the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) about my position. I stayed in the city and worked at the multidisciplinary medical center "Taurt Medical," the doctor shares.

A woman recalls life in the occupation. Lack of food, medicine and invisible battles. One of them is for hryvnia. The Russians deprived the people of Kherson of freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to read a Ukrainian book on the bus; freedom of communication with loved ones who left, because they implemented Russian mobile communication, through which it was impossible to call loved ones in free Ukraine. It was essential not to give up the hryvnia! The Russians imposed the ruble on the local residents. Boys who exchanged currency were locked up in basements. In addition, shops, pharmacies, and coffee shops were prohibited from operating if they did not accept rubles. "Volunteering saved the day. Many people from Kherson worked for free then, in order not to go crazy, to find at least some kind of employment," says Svitlana.

In February-March, the woman did not leave the kitchen: "I cooked, cooked, cooked. I learned to work with dough, because there was a lot of flour. The owner of the warehouse that was bombed gave us the flour for nothing. Everything went well for our volunteers.

I asked myself many times: how do I manage to be so productive? Probably, my "strength formula" is very simple: I have a husband who is a psychiatrist by profession. So he says to me in a moment of despair: "Have you cried yet? Then go and work!". And the daily routine, but which is extremely necessary, formed an understanding of why I don't leave: I will leave holding the hand of the last patient."

Son

At the beginning of the war, Svitlana's son was an internship in obstetrics/gynecology at the hospital named after O. Luchanskyi. This is the hospital that started receiving wounded civilians and soldiers on February 24. He went to help sort the wounded. He spent the night in the hospital for a week. He came home only to take food for the doctors, staff and wounded, as well as for the students who were hiding in the basement of the dormitory.

In April, rumors began to spread through the city that the Russians would mobilize medics in the occupied territory, and then the question of the evacuation of Svitlana's son arose. The couple planned their escape. The guy went to accompany a disabled person to Odesa, because he had a doctor's degree. Without money (because all the savings went to help poorer citizens in a more difficult situation), without personal belongings (because officially he was just accompanying a sick patient). Already in Odessa, doctors, whom Svitlana did not even know personally, found shelter for the boy, clothes and fed him. As a young specialist, he even had an invitation to work at a hospital. But he went to the military commissariat. Now he defends the Motherland and received an award called "Silver Cross".

Liberation

November 2022. Kherson was incredibly happy about the liberation! Then those people who left the city were jealous of those who remained in the city. It was two weeks of continuous celebration! People with Ukrainian flags on their shoulders walked the streets of the city from the end of the curfew until its beginning. They were smiling, singing! Svitlana recalls how the soldiers were immediately surrounded by crowds on the streets, everyone wanted to hug or at least shake hands with the Ukrainian liberator. However, it was very difficult in terms of the availability of many household items and products, the situation was even worse than at the beginning of the war, because the Russians took everything they could, and what they could not take, they broke. Before leaving the city, the Russian military also robbed the maternity hospital. They walked around the department and took everything they saw. "Laparoscopy supplies and medicines were stolen. And what they could not take away, they crushed, such as the ultrasound machine, - says the woman. "At that time, there was a great shortage of food, there was no water and electricity in the city for almost a month and a half, but the air smelled like a festive spirit!"

Losses

After Kherson was liberated and the heads of the maternity center left with the Russians, who had sided with the Russian Federation since the occupation, the head of the trade union of doctors in Kherson asked Svitlana Kulinich to return to the perinatal center. So Svitlana became the deputy head doctor of the institution. However, eight doctors out of 40 remained in the maternity ward, so since then they have been working non-stop: deliveries, operations, consultations and ... losses.

"I had an assistant," the doctor recalls. – A young nurse. An incredibly positive girl who sang all the time. She sang in the examination room, in the operating room. I hear her voice even now. In Kherson, she had no one but me. She considered her home a safe place because it was on the first floor. But on January 29, 2023, there was a massive missile attack on Kherson. Also, a rocket fell into Natalia's apartment while she was still sleeping. I came to the morgue for identification, and there were many people there. A lot of people indeed! Bodies were lying everywhere: on stretchers, dissection tables, on the floor. And my Natalia was lying among them. A voice echoed in his soul: "Why did you come and kill this child?!".

The second victim among the employees of the Kherson maternity hospital was nurse Anastasia Saksaganska and her husband. On the night of September 15-16, 2023, the Russian military abducted a couple from their home in temporarily occupied Mali Kopany in the Kherson region. The occupiers killed the husband and wife, and took their car. Relatives claim that the couple was killed because they refused to receive Russian passports and cooperate with the occupiers. "Anastasia was on maternity leave... Her two-year-old daughter Margarita remained an orphan," says Svitlana Kulinich.

Born during the war

Kherson is constantly under fire. There are three boxes each in the maternity ward on the floor where mothers and newborns stay together. The rooms are located like petals and border each other. It so happened that one day the first and third boxes were empty, and a woman in labor with a baby was in the second. The explosion blew out windows in the first and third boxes. The second box, where the mother and child were, was not affected. Then the local priest said: "Mother and child survived thanks to a lucky chance. Therefore, God really needs this child to survive."

Nowadays, doctors have single-handedly converted the basement of the maternity hospital into an operating room and delivery room, and there is also a large room with beds for mothers in labor and strollers for babies.

Doctors persuade pregnant women who are being observed in the hospital to go to other, safer regions to give birth. But persuasion does not work on everyone. And there are consistently from six to 20 births per month in the Kherson maternity hospital. This is a lot for a city under constant fire, doctors say.

After the Kakhovka tragedy, the number of residents in the maternity ward increased. The family of acting chief physician Oksana Tomchenko and several other families of doctors lost their homes. The country house of Svitlana Kulinich herself was also flooded. Now the families of doctors live in the women's consultation room.

There are enough dramatic stories in the perinatal center to write a book, but fortunately, all of them have a happy ending for babies.

Yes, a young mother, whose house was destroyed by heavy water, and her husband is fighting, having given birth to a child, wrote a rejection letter from it. But at night there was shelling. "The woman ran down the corridor of the maternity ward with the child in her arms and shouted: 'I will never give you to anyone!'" recalls Svitlana.

And recently, a widow came for an abortion. There are two children at home, her husband died at the front two weeks ago, and she is pregnant with... twins. Doctors began to dissuade the woman from having an abortion, sent her home to think for at least a day. And they themselves have already found a potential infertile patient who could adopt twins. But in the morning, the twins' mother returned to the perinatal center to register and said: "Now is not the time to kill anyone!". Here is such a poignant story that the doctor shared with us.

On September 19, Kherson again suffered from a rocket attack. There are victims... And a girl weighing 4 kg was born in the Kherson maternity ward. Life wins...

The text was prepared in collaboration with the dattalion project.

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.