A grim scene awaited Dr. Oleksandr Sherbina as he made the rounds of Clinical Hospital No. 7, a medical facility that once specialized in treating strokes but is suddenly immersed in the atrocities of war. As he passed the operating theater, surgeons were amputating the lower leg of a wounded Ukrainian soldier.
The hospital is near a combat zone in a northwestern suburb of Kyiv, where the booms of incoming artillery can be heard inside the building amid a scramble of activity as triage nurses greet the ambulances arriving every few minutes. In a hallway, an orderly used a rag to wash blood off stretchers.
"The flow of wounded is growing,” said Sherbina, a surgeon who is the hospital’s director.