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Voices of war
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How volunteer doctors work with victims of Russian aggression

Since the beginning of the war, volunteer doctors of the FRIDA organization have been working free of charge in the frontline territories. For a year and a half, they managed to assist thousands of civilians. In this interview, doctors talk about their work in Bakhmut and other hot spots, the people they saved, and rethinking their inner values.

‘If we don’t invest in art, we can fail’, Matvii Vaisberg says

Paintings by the artist Matvii Vaisberg became illustrations for the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s new book about Mariupol. He says that the war was the most productive period for him, complains about the uglification of urban space, and believes we should do more to promote contemporary Ukrainian art worldwide.

‘After the de-occupation, he collected the bodies of dead Russian soldiers’

Yurii Serohin is a resident of Dmytrivka in the Kyev Region. The beginning of the war found him at work in Kyiv. It took him two days to return to his native village on foot, and when he arrived, it was occupied. An artillery shell destroyed his house and all his property.

Polygraph to attest pro-Ukrainian position: Doctor from Kherson

Leonid Remyha was in charge of one of the hospitals in Kherson at the beginning of the Russian invasion. The head physician ended up in a Russian torture chamber for refusing to cooperate with the invaders.

‘Sight of it left me speechless’

“Burned cars, murdered women and men...” — Ruslan Kosian, a resident of the village of Dmytrivka, talks about the consequences of the Russian occupation. The man did not want to leave his house and was under occupation. Despite the risk, he delivered aid to the long-suffering Bucha, Moschun, and Borodianka. Once, Ruslan had to drive the Russians out of his yard.

One step away from death — the story of volunteer Maksym Vainer

Maksym Vainer worked in an international team engaged in medical evacuation in the Bakhmut area. They were trying to evacuate a woman wounded after a shelling when a Russian missile hit their car. Maksym received numerous injuries, and his partner, an American medical volunteer, Pete Reed, died.

‘The man killed by a Russian sniper could not be buried for two months’

At the beginning of a full-scale war, the quiet life of the Stoianka village inhabitants in the Kyiv Region turned into hell. The Russians bombed the village from planes, tortured and killed people in their homes, and snipers shot people on the roads. A village resident, Olena, says they practically could not get out of the cellar due to heavy shelling.

American Volunteer at Bucha Morgue

Patrick Loveless came to Bucha immediately after its release: he helped to sort the corpses in the Bucha morgue and saw and felt the consequences of what the Russians did. What he saw shocked him so much that he could not forget about it.

‘I prayed to God for my trees to resist’

Liudmyla Lomeiko, a resident of Moshun (village in Kyiv Region), used to transmit the coordinates of the enemy to her son, who is serving now in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, during the first days of the full-scale war. She prayed for the trees she had planted with her own hands to resist.

‘Every minute we wondered whether we would survive or not’

“Day and night merged into one. We were terrified of them, and I still fear them now,” says Vira Kaidan, a Zalissia resident who hid from the Russians in an unfamiliar basement for nine days. Seeing a man on the street, the Russians fired into the air, and when the family tried to evacuate, they assured them that the Ukrainians were shelling the village.

‘When a rocket hit our shelter, a hot water pipe there was damaged. My friend was doused with boiling water, all his clothes just stuck to him’

Denys Nozhaiskyi has relatives in Mariupol. He was in Kyiv when the war began, but fate brought him later to Bucha during the days of the heaviest shelling. The man says that now he has only one wish: to go to the war and take revenge on the enemy.

‘For two weeks I slept on damp earth’, — a resident of the village of Zalissia

Iryna Kovalenko celebrated her golden wedding and was involved in peaceful activities usually done by villagers. She never thought that the so-called “brothers” would come to kill and destroy houses. She had to leave the occupation in a car shot through by the Russians, and when the woman returned, she saw ashes and devastation.

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