How Kyiv’s Hospital #8 Became the War’s Front Line for Wounded Ukrainians

The thud of a Russian missile shook the glass of the hospital windows shortly after dawn last week. An hour later, the ragged clump of elderly civilians with bloody faces tottered into an emergency entrance, looking top-heavy with piles of bandages on their heads.

When nurses helped them shed their padded jackets, shards of glass from the folds of their clothing sprinkled to the floor like confetti. Nurses wheeled them to operating rooms on steel gurneys, where doctors spent more than an hour using tweezers to pull more shards out of their faces, hands and the buttocks of one man who lay on his stomach clenching his fists.

Then doctors stitched their wounds shut.

Kyiv’s Clinical Hospital #8, the city’s largest, was a center of excellence for scheduled surgeries on problems like hernias and heart valves. Then Russia’s invasion swept up to the edge of Kyiv, within 10 miles of the hospital, turning it into a front-line medical facility.

The staff, like the millions of Ukrainians now engulfed in a war, are changing with it. Dermatologists and cardiologists now help triage patients, who arrive in ambulances and private cars from artillery and rocket barrages.

Staff no longer duck for cover when there are air raid warnings, which they say are too numerous to take seriously. Nor do they bother much with face masks to ward against Covid-19, with the rattle of fighting in the background of conversations.

“Of course we are not what we used to be, but neither is the rest of the country,” said Igor Khomenko, director of the hospital.

Along with millions of Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 who are now mobilized for service, Dr. Khomenko has abridged his hopes for normalcy. For 30 years, he worked as a military surgeon, and earlier this year quit the military to try civilian life as head of Hospital #8.

Like many Ukrainians, Dr. Khomenko was aware of threats from Russia, but didn’t expect a full-scale war.

Two weeks after he quit the military, the invasion began. Since then he has been sleeping on a couch in his office, while his wife has taken refuge far from the battlefront in western Ukraine. As patients arrive, he paces the hallways of the emergency wing of the hospital, barking orders to move patients along to treatment.

“I tried civilian life and it didn’t last long,” he said.

He canceled scheduled surgeries and dismissed half of the staff, so that now only 200 of the hospital’s beds are ready for occupancy. Whole floors of the hospital stand empty and dark, conforming to a citywide blackout at night to make Kyiv a harder target for Russian bombing.

The types of wounds that the hospital encounters have evolved with the war, Dr. Khomenko said. In the first week, the hospital received a tide of gunshot wounds as gunbattles between Ukrainian troops and Russian provocateurs broke out in the city, Dr. Khomenko said.

Soon more patients arrived with shrapnel wounds and concussions, as both sides moved their artillery into position and began blasting one another from a distance.

The hospital’s easy proximity to the fighting saved some lives, Dr. Khomenko said. Normally, battlefield wounded are treated on the field and then at mobile field hospitals before they are moved to larger facilities for surgery, he explained. But Hospital #8 is so close to the fighting that some wounded move directly from battle to the operating room, he said.

Dr. Khomenko operated on one man early in the invasion who was shot through the heart. The hospital was able to save him because staff had time to crack open his chest and sew the hole shut before he bled to death.

Dr. Khomenko keeps a video of the operation on his cellphone, showing how he plugged the hole in the pumping heart with his index finger.

Like front-line hospitals in any war, controlling bleeding is the most important function of its emergency room, and massive blood transfusions are common, surgeons at the hospital said. Dr. Khomenko said that has made the hospital’s leading vascular surgeon, Makhmud Akmad, a leader in trauma treatment.

Born in Gaza, Dr. Akmad came to Ukraine to study medicine and decided to stay after meeting a fellow student who became his wife. Until last month he mostly performed scheduled heart surgeries. After Russia’s invasion, he and his wife moved into one of the hospital’s rooms with their daughter and son, who is studying to be a vascular surgeon like him.

Together, he and his son are on 24-hour call, running to the emergency room whenever several wounded patients appear there. Dr. Akmad said he also gets calls from his relatives in Gaza. “They tell me to come back to Gaza, that Ukraine is too dangerous,” he said. “I tell them that I will stay here, Ukraine is my home now.”

The arrival of new patients, Dr. Akmad said, is usually preceded by an explosion in the city or the nearby front line, and then a phone call from the emergency room saying the wounded are on their way. He said the hospital can save almost anyone who arrives at the emergency entrance alive, although last week he saved one man who was clinically dead.

Dr. Akmad said that the man’s heart stopped by the time he arrived at the hospital after a piece of shrapnel passed through his lower leg severing two arteries there. Staff restarted his heart and gave him a transfusion of 2.5 liters of blood. Dr. Akmad tied off one artery and inserted a stent to restore the other’s blood flow to the leg.

Dr. Khomenko said that soldiers, whom he treated in the past as a military surgeon, were generally impatient to return to duty and resume fighting.

But civilians usually have a more disheartening reaction to getting wounded, Dr. Akmad said. “They are not used to this and they did not ask for it,” he said. When they are wounded, they must cope with their injuries as well as the destruction of their homes.

While Kyiv has suffered few civilian casualties compared with other Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol, the human carnage is becoming more common as Russia’s invasion gets bogged down and Moscow resorts to missiles or artillery lobbed into the capital.

The missile strike that sent patients to the hospital last week with glass cuts landed near an apartment block in the early morning. Anatoly Grytsan, 64, was watching a newscast in his living room while his mother, 92, sat next to the television, drinking a cup of tea when it hit.

Mr. Grytsan said he doesn’t remember hearing an explosion—only a flash outside and the windows to the apartment blew inside and the window frames with them. One shard of glass ripped his hand and another across his forehead. The blood coming down his face made it impossible to see what happened next. “We didn’t know what to think,” he said.

He said he fumbled across the room to his mother, who wasn’t cut by flying glass because his mother, who he said is tiny, was shielded by the television. He guided her to their front door, but it wouldn’t budge because the blast had bent the door frame. Some rescue workers arrived and broke down the door and took him and his mother to separate hospitals.

He spoke to his mother by phone since then, and learned she wasn’t seriously hurt. Doctors cleaned and stitched his own wounds and wound a bandage around his head and gave him a set of secondhand clothes donated to the hospital, including a black T-shirt that read “Ready” across its front.

Sitting in his hospital room, he said he doesn’t know yet where he and his mother will live after doctors release them. “But maybe I will be here for a while,” he said.