I walked down the corridor and peeked through a glass door at a thirteen-year-old boy on a hospital bed, his face cut and bruised by an explosion of shrapnel. It appeared that only one of two things could make it through this war: Putin’s Presidency or Ukrainian statehood.Īs the fighting dragged on, the wards at Ohmatdyt steadily filled up with children injured in shelling and missile strikes. Ukraine became an independent state after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and, no matter how fractious its politics have been since, the vast majority of Ukrainians have shown little interest in coming once more under the writ of Moscow. Zelensky, seeing that the Ukrainian military held up against the initial onslaught of Russian forces far longer than most experts had expected-and that the country rallied together-was not inclined to concede to an aggressor. Having embarked on a war that did not deliver a quick triumph, and which was exacting a ruinous toll on the Russian economy, Putin had no choice but to emerge with something he could credibly present as a victory. After the talks, Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted, “Unfortunately, the Russian side is still extremely biased regarding the destructive processes it launched.”Ī grinding stalemate was taking shape. Members of the Ukrainian delegation, for their part, sought an immediate end to the Russian offensive. The Kremlin’s opening position built on Putin’s stated aims from the first day of the war: Ukraine must not only recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, in eastern Ukraine, as independent states, but declare its neutrality and demilitarize-a vaguely articulated process that suggested, in effect, a rejection of its own national sovereignty. “But I don’t understand what is going on around us, here and across the country-something absurd and terrible is happening.”Ī television in the corner of the room was on, delivering the news from Belarus, where delegations from the Ukrainian and Russian governments were engaged in a futile day of negotiations. “As a doctor, I understand what happened to this child,” Zhezhera told me. He was on life support, with little sign of brain activity. Not good, Zhezhera said: shrapnel had passed through the side of his neck.
A tiny head poked out from under a light-blue blanket. He led me up a flight of stairs to Semyon’s hospital room. When I first met him, he was slumped in a chair in the hallway, several days’ growth of beard on his face. No one had been sleeping much in Kyiv since the start of what Vladimir Putin was calling a “special military operation,” but one of the doctors who treated Semyon, a pediatric surgeon named Roman Zhezhera, looked particularly exhausted. It was a couple of days before the staff located his grandmother and learned the boy’s name: Semyon. An ambulance brought the boy, unconscious and losing blood, to Ohmatdyt, where doctors performed emergency surgery and put him on a ventilator. His parents and one sister died on the spot his other sister was taken to a different hospital. Shells exploded around them, sending shrapnel ripping through glass and metal, then flesh. He had been riding in a car with his parents and two sisters when they came under fire. 1, a seven-year-old boy, arrived at Ohmatdyt children’s hospital, in Kyiv, on the second day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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