“He was perfectly calm until he found her,” he said. “Because he told us that until the last one he hoped it was not her. “Then he cried a lot, it was a very sad situation.” An unnamed image of a woman with a pale face and a bloody left hip coming out of the ruins on a stretcher is one of the defining images of the horror caused during the siege of the southern port city. Several politicians, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, have called the attack a war crime. Russian officials said at the time that the patients and personnel had left and that Ukrainian military targets were at the scene, although there was no evidence to support the allegations. According to Buzunar, head of the telemedicine department at the regional intensive care unit, two buses carrying stunned and bloodied women and babies, just days or even hours, arrived at the hospital – the largest in the Donetsk region – for treatment that day, 9 Of March. “When the maternity ward was attacked, we still had police in town,” he said. “A patrol car arrived at our hospital and said that the ladies would bring us. We said we did not have the right conditions to deal with them, but under the circumstances we had no choice. “We did not have a specialist, only a neurologist, a gynecologist and a gynecologist. The woman in the picture was hit by shrapnel and lost a lot of blood. “We tried to save her but we did not succeed.” An injured pregnant woman was transported from a maternity hospital damaged by bombings in Mariupol on March 9. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka / AP After the attack, one of the women gave birth to two babies – a boy and a girl. Three more children were born, some by caesarean section. However, they came at a time when Buzhanan’s hospital was facing a new problem: it had fallen into Russian occupation. The staff had taken refuge in the basement when, on March 11 or 12 (Buzunan is not sure who, due to stress), heard gunshots. “The Russian soldiers said, ‘Lie on the floor or we will start throwing grenades at you,’ and that was when they entered the hospital,” he said. “They spoke to the administration, which asked them not to interfere in the work of the hospital. The main thing they asked us was not to leave. “They said anyone who did that would be shot.” It was a tense and stressful period. She could not leave the facility, so she lived in the basement, sleeping on sofas and chairs next to her colleagues, while two or three armed soldiers were on each floor – first Russians and then separatists, she believes. The men were aggressive, repeatedly threatening the doctors with machine guns and turning the first floor, which was an administrative office, into a military base. Bouzunar said the Russians soon evacuated up to 2,000 civilians from nearby homes, even though they had no means to feed them and no place for people to sleep. At about the same time, Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kirilenko said on Facebook that patients and civilians had been taken hostage at the hospital by Russians using them as human shields. The hospital worked to treat mainly shrapnel and bullet wounds to civilians and soldiers. The Russian soldiers were quickly evacuated to recover elsewhere, while the Ukrainian soldiers who were lucky enough to be in the hospital when the Russians arrived were considered prisoners, Buznar said. Alina Buzunar at the Mariupol Regional Intensive Care Unit on the second day of the Russian invasion, February 25. Photo: Emre Çaylak “It was already very difficult because we did not have many medicines and windows were missing due to explosions. “It was icy cold, minus temperatures, so all the patients were kept in the corridors,” he said. “Then a tank came and started firing at the hospital. “One staff member had broken his ribs and all the patients lying in the hallway looked like they were on the open road because the walls were destroyed – all these patients died.” Amnesty International has said that Russia’s indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine and on protected objects such as hospitals could violate international humanitarian law. Buznar, who fled to western Ukraine in late March, said she asked Russian troops why they had been shot at the hospital and was unable to answer. He has no pictures or videos of what happened because people leaving the city are forced to wipe their phones by Russian soldiers. Dozens of other displaced people also said their phones had been searched. The hospital staff had been informed by Russian forces that they could not leave until they were replaced by other health professionals, but Bouzunar said they had now brought in new workers from separatist areas and managed to leave. She now faces the complex task of coming to terms with her psychological trauma. “When you work, you try not to show that you are afraid. “But now I’m afraid to even stand by a window because I’m waiting for a sniper to shoot me,” he said.
