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The children are from Donbass region, with the youngest patient being less than a year old. They were transported by a Russian Emergencies Ministry plane and taken to specialized hospitals in the Russian capital on Thursday.
The evacuation of children was carried out under the patronage of Russian philanthropist Elizaveta Glinka, widely known as Dr. Liza for her humanitarian and charity work, TV Tsentr (TVC) channel reported. The kids will now be treated in Moscow clinics with advanced technology treatment the eastern Ukrainian hospitals are lacking.
“All the children are with severe congenital disorders, mainly with heart diseases. One child has multiple congenital anomalies, including central nervous system disorder and cardiovascular system disorder,” physician-in-chief of one of the Moscow clinics where the kids were taken told TVC.
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“His name is Alyosha [Alex], 1 year and 3 months old. He has five heart disorders, but local cardiologists have left so there was nobody to monitor his [state of health]. He also has a congenital fissure of the hard palate, which means we have to do another operation,” a patient’s mother, Natalya Yermolayeva, told the channel.
Another patient, who it just 1.5 months old, is a little girl called Sadiya. She suffers from myelomeningocele, which is a severe form of protrusion of the spinal cord, and had already been operated in Ukraine. However, she got complications and is now in an urgent need of diagnostics and treatment.
RT’s Murad Gazdiev had previously met the children and their families at the Central Clinical Hospital in the war-torn city of Donetsk, in the east of Ukraine, while they were waiting to get the medical help they so desperately needed.
“We were offered treatment, and we’ve been waiting for this for some time. We’re happy it all worked out,” one of the parents told RT.
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Another parent said that they could not be treated in other parts of Ukraine, as they “don’t have the money and they can’t carry out the operation here.”
A doctor at the hospital explained that there is lack of staff as “many have left, because they are not being paid.”
He also added that there is a shortage of medicines and said the situation faced in Donetsk is, “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) stressed in March of the urgent need to protect medical facilities and to make sure medicines and medical supplies were safely delivered to conflict-affected areas in Ukraine.
A statement released on March 19, said that more than 100 health facilities have been damaged or destroyed during the fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. The fund’s emergency directors visited a hospital in Donetsk in March saying that it “lacked even the most basic supplies, including surgical gloves, IV fluid, antibiotics and bandages.”
More than 3,000 civilians have died and over 2,200 people are missing since the start of the military conflict in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, the local human rights commissioner’s press service said on Thursday.
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