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Medics near Kupiansk treat victims of cluster bomb in darkness – video

The human tragedy of Hrushivka: the aftermath of a Russian cluster bomb attack in Ukraine

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‘We couldn’t do anything for them’ - medics speak out after a strike on a village close to the frontline

Elena Bulakhtina was on the way back to her medical clinic when a cluster bomb screamed across the sky. There was a bang, then two seconds later a series of detonations, as deadly shrapnel whizzed through the air. Bulakhtina, a doctor, flung herself to the ground. She made it to her workplace basement just as a second bomb exploded, and then a third.

Not everyone was as lucky. The Russian attack took place on Tuesday afternoon, in the once peaceful village of Hrushivka, about 8km away from the frontline in the north-east of Ukraine. A few locals were standing next to a generator, where they were able to charge their phones and check emails. Pensioner Nikolai Koliyenko was sitting on a bench outside his house. It was overcast.

Bomb fragments killed Koliyenko. A woman in her fifties, Vera Shevtsova, also died. “We couldn’t do anything for them. The elderly man had multiple shrapnel injuries. We left him. Those are our triage rules,” Bulakhtina explained. Instead she helped the living. They included a critically wounded 10-year-old boy, Andriy Seydnuk, who was hit in the head by metal casing.

Flowers placed by residents on a bench close to the spot in Hrushivka where two people were killed on Tuesday by a cluster bomb. Photograph: Elena Bulakhtina

The building filled up with screaming children and desperate adults. “I only knew I was treating a boy in a green hoodie. He was barely breathing. A colleague bandaged his head. We had nothing for kids. Miraculously there was a tube approximately his size so we could intubate him. We had no oxygen so ran our ventilator on room air. It was the best we could do for him,” she said.

More victims were brought in. They included a teenage girl with a shrapnel wound to her upper arm and lower leg, a 40-year-old mother of five hit in the abdomen, and a male pensioner with an arterial bleed. Plus a young man with a serious spinal injury who was unable to walk or feel his legs. The patients – a dozen of them – were driven to hospital in Kharkiv, 100km away. The 10-year-old went to a neurological unit, where his condition on Friday was grave.

The episode was terrible. And what you might call mundane. It was ordinary in the sense that Moscow has been dropping cluster bombs on civilians since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, more than six long months ago. The tragedy in Hrushivka was, on a micro scale, an echo of the horrors of Mariupol, where thousands died this spring under rockets and air-launched missiles.

“My son was a clever boy. He liked gymnastics. He used to roam around on his own. When the explosion happened I tried to find him,” Seydnuk’s father, Denis, said, sitting outside the clinic and smoking a cigarette. “I was shouting and screaming: ‘Andriy! Andriy! Has anyone seen a boy in a green hoodie?’ And then the medics told me what happened.” Andriy’s elder sister, Uliana, and mother, Olga, were unhurt.

Blood on the tarmac after the strike. Photograph: Elena Bulakhtina

The Russians occupied Hrushivka – a community of 1,000 people, with a school, a few shops, and a fishing lake – in March. The Ukrainian armed forces drove them out two weeks ago as part a sweeping counter-offensive during which Kyiv recaptured almost all of Kharkiv oblast. The new frontline is down the road in the town of Kupiansk, now the scene of a large and thunderous battle.

On Thursday, thick black smoke drifted over a hill to Hrushivka. From somewhere nearby a Ukrainian tank fired a round at Russian troops who were hiding in a forest, dug in about two kilometres beyond the Oskil River. Then there was the dramatic sound of US-supplied HIMARS multiple long-range rockets taking off.

A British combat medic and former soldier, who goes by the name of Fish, said the Russians had been trying to break through, so far without success. He showed off fragments of shrapnel that he collected from Tuesday’s attack. They included pieces of tail-fin and a detonator. He treated patients in the dark, illuminating their wounds with a head-torch and a mobile phone.

“I was watching TV in April back in the UK. I saw these kids hurt in Kyiv and decided to come and help,” he explained. “There is no reason for children to be caught up in this. It’s inhuman and deplorable.” He and other volunteers had treated soldier-casualties from Ukraine’s recent successful military operation in a ruined school, lying them down on wooden pallets and hooking drips from metal railings.

Stas Yaramenko, an anaesthesiologist, was scathing about the Kremlin’s tactics. “Russia is a terrorist country. They are using nuclear blackmail. They want us to negotiate on their terms,” he said. Could Ukraine win the war? “We don’t have any alternative. Look at what happened in the 1930s. Stalin gave Ukraine famine and had our poets and composers shot,” he said.

Shrapnel from the Russian strike in Hrushivka. Photograph: Elena Bulakhtina

Just outside the village a group of refugees from Kupiansk sheltered under a broken flyover. Alexiy Mitutianov, 38, said there was heavy fighting in and around the town and continuous shelling, especially during the day. There was no electricity or gas, and the three shops that were still open had almost run out of food. Anything left was extremely expensive, he said.

Mitutianov said residents had held a pro-Ukrainian rally on 9 March after Russian troops rolled in from across the border. About 150 people gathered in Kupiansk’s Constitution Square, previously named after Lenin. “We waved Ukrainian flags. I lit a flare. Immediately a Russian soldier grabbed me. I didn’t have time to protest. I spent the next few months in jail,” he said.

Several hundred people were crammed into a police station basement, he added. Their guards came from the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic. They beat inmates on a regular basis, using wooden sticks and rubber tubes, he said, adding: “They were worse than Russians.” The Ukrainian army freed him when it took over the town, he said, adding: “I’m broke and I have no plan.”

Back in Hrushivka, Bulakhtina said she would take a break from the war next month and return to her home in Canada. Originally from Russia, she said she despised Putin and had decided to use her medical skills in Ukraine. “This is history in the making. I wanted to do something rather than to sit at home and post ‘Fuck Putin’ on Facebook all day,” she said.

Still, the sight of badly injured children took its toll, she conceded. “I’m not paranoid. But whenever I go out I look at the sky,” she said. “You are kind of constantly watching to see if anything is falling on you. If it lands on you there’s not much you can do. And if it doesn’t you fall to the ground and run.”

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