“We only take emergency patients and war injured – all scheduled operations have been cancelled since the start of the war,” she said. With 425 beds, it is one of the biggest in the Kyiv region, and effectively on standby. Nina Vasilivna, director of the hospital, says staff are getting ready for the war to arrive not just on their doorstep but in the hospital, if Russia renews its now-stalled assault on the capital. Non-emergency patients are discharged from Bila Tserkva’s hospital No2, which has received scanning equipment donated by University Hospitals of Leicester. The World Health Organization says it has verified at least “43 attacks on healthcare” – hospitals, patients, or other infrastructure – since the war began. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been marked by intense attacks on civilian infrastructure. They were brought here because treating their injuries was extremely complicated, or because the hospitals treating them closer to the front line were under fire. Several were injured when a rocket hit an apartment block in the town, about 50 miles south-west of the capital, but most were hit in regions where fighting rages to the north and east of Kyiv. A third interviewed by the Observer was so badly wounded by a shell that forming a short sentence leaves him breathless with exhaustion. Another faces months of recovery after a sniper bullet shattered his thigh bone. One lost an eye to an explosion as he chatted with friends. The few dozen patients they have taken in since war broke out are harbingers of the storm to come.

Bila Tserkva’s No2 hospital was emptied of patients and its cold-war-era bomb shelter filled with beds to prepare for the horror its doctors have watched overwhelm medics in other cities.

No escape hospital