The Doctors Who Are Now Prisoners of War
When Russia’s siege of Mariupol began in February, Ivan Demkiv was the senior surgeon at a military hospital known simply by its number: 555. The hospital took in 20 wounded on the first day of the war. The number kept going up from there. For weeks, Demkiv hardly left the operating theater. His days were an endless succession of limb amputations and other lifesaving interventions, the sound of Russia’s bombardment of the city always in the background. Demkiv stayed at work even when Russians bombed the hospital itself, scattering broken glass over a patient unconscious on the operating table.
The price of that dedication was his eventual capture. Demkiv was taken prisoner in mid-April, along with 77 other doctors and hospital staff, and has been held ever since at a complex called Olenivka in the Russian-occupied east. The experience of Demkiv and his colleagues is revealing on a number of levels. First, it shows Russia’s willingness to imprison noncombatant Ukrainians in areas it has captured, either to hold them as bargaining chips for prisoner swaps or to put them to work under duress. More than that, it suggests that Russia is violating humanitarian laws that apply to
