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Oleksandr Gromadskyi, a Ukrainian soldier, was returning to his position in the eastern region of Donetsk one night in early September 2024. He’d navigated these frontlines for two years, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but that night his vehicle rolled over an anti-tank mine. The explosion ripped the tank to pieces but somehow spared Gromadskyi’s life.
His injuries — to the spine, abdominal wall, arm and several other areas — were extensive, and Gromadskyi was passed from one hospital to another as the complexity of his case proved beyond the capacity of multiple medical teams.
Oleksandr Gromadskyi in his hospital room at the Vinnytsia Regional Pirogov Clinical Hospital. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
Ultimately, he landed at the Vinnytsia National Medical University Hospital, roughly 500 miles from where his tank exploded, in the care of Dr. Roman Chornopyshchuk.
“It was too hard for regional hospitals to provide care for such a difficult patient,” Chornopyshchuk said. “That’s why we decided to move this patient back here.”
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Chornopyshchuk is uniquely qualified to handle complex cases like Gromadskyi’s, in part because he participated in a program — based at Yale University’s School of Medicine — called Doctors United for Ukraine, or DU4U.
Gromadskyi shows a photo of the tank he was in when he rolled over an anti-tank mine. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
Established in 2022 by a group of Yale-based doctors and researchers, the organization provides medical support and education for Ukrainian medical professionals via equipment donations, lectures and in-person training.
Gromadskyi, who now relies on a wheelchair to get around, experienced necrosis and received skin grafts — several of which his body initially rejected. He lost both his legs and needs to be fitted for prosthetics. During his treatment and recovery, he said he found strength in visits from fellow soldiers, friends and family.
Speaking softly, a gentle look in his deep brown eyes, Gromadskyi said he wants to return to the frontlines. “The boys are waiting there for me,” he said.
Vinnytsia National Medical University Hospital. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
### Treating trauma
As the war in Ukraine escalates — in both intensity and magnitude — doctors like Chornopyshchuk are waging their own battle to keep up.
“Day by day, month by month, the number of patients is only increasing,” Chornopyshchuk said. “The severity has also increased a lot.”
On a cloudy day in the early summer, Chornopyshchuk moved quickly through the Vinnytsia hospital’s labyrinthine corridors, which are adorned with art from rehabilitated soldiers and their families. Checking on one wounded patient after another, the doctor’s cheerful disposition and boundless energy were like sunshine beaming down the sterile halls.
The burn unit where he works has a staff of about 70, including 10 surgeons, and it’s equipped to handle complex cases. More than half the patients they treat suffer from combat injuries that include burns, Chornopyshchuk explained.
Dr. Roman Chornopyshchuk sits at his desk at Vinnytsia Regional Pirogov Clinical Hospital. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
“They are usually combined with other types of trauma,” he said. “Usually it’s eyes, ears, different brain injuries and so on. The priority is burn injuries that are usually more than 30% of the total body surface area.”
An injury that extensive is no longer uncommon. The severity of injuries has been rising alongside the war’s growing intensity.
In Kyiv, about four hours northeast of Vinnytsia, Dr. Olena Kvasha practices otolaryngology — ear, nose and throat medicine — at the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine. While her hospital is non-military, she estimates that 90% of her patients are now military patients. Many suffer from blast-induced eardrum injuries.
Yuriy Petrakovskyi in his hospital bed in Kyiv. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
Kvasha’s patient, 49-year-old Yuriy Petrovskyi, had been in the Ukrainian army for just over a year and a half when Russian forces dropped a grenade into his dugout in early June. Aside from his eardrum injury, Petrovskyi also has bits of shrapnel lodged in his eyes and other parts of his body.
Even during treatment at the hospital, the war remains ever-present. Russia has ramped up its drone and missile attacks, and air raid sirens regularly wail across the city of Kyiv and around the academy campus — as they did on a cloudy Tuesday morning in June as Petrovskyi visited Kvasha for a checkup.
The academy campus has three bomb shelters equipped with bean bag chairs, beds, seating and a makeshift operating room. But they’re rarely used, even when the sirens signal an attack.
“We don’t go down (into the shelter),” Kvasha said with a sheepish grin before hurrying away to continue her rounds.
Dr. Olena Kvasha performs an operation at the Institute of Otolaryngology of the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
### Connecticut connection
Drs. Kvasha and Chornopyshchuk met last year in Connecticut, where they participated in the Yale DU4U program.
The idea for the program started to take shape in the early days following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Dr. Alla Vash-Margita, a gynecologist at Yale who immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine, had been attending meetings organized by Ukrainian undergraduate students, where she and DU4U’s other founding members first made connections with students, faculty and researchers who were concerned about the war.
“Instead of crying — which I did a lot those days — and watching the news and being sad and angry, we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to put our minds and time to the cause.’”
That cause, they decided, would be to help support the doctors and nurses treating the rising number of combat-related injuries in Ukraine. Like the Ukrainian coat of arms — a trident — the effort would be three-pronged, incorporating intensive care, the health of women and children and mental health.
At first, DU4U focused on raising money and sending medical equipment that Yale practitioners were no longer using. But as the war progressed, Vash-Margita said, “we kind of started realizing that no matter how much money we have, we’re not going to be able to provide medical equipment for the entire Ukraine.”
She and other doctors began to shift their focus to medical education.
“There’s a severe shortage of doctors and even more so nurses,” Vash-Margita said. “So the situation has been precarious, and it’s not much better today, if not worse.”
To date, DU4U has hosted three cohorts of medical professionals from Ukraine to train for a month with local doctors in the types of specialized care that are critical in the war zone. Vash-Margita said the program is limited only by which facilities can host visiting doctors for the 4-week period they’re in the U.S.
Kvasha and Chornopyshchuk joined five other doctors in New Haven late last summer.
“It was a great period of professional life,” said Chornopyshchuk, who spent some of his time in Connecticut observing doctors in Bridgeport Hospital’s burn center. “It was rather intensive, rather interesting and rather fruitful,” he said.
The most recent cohort of Ukrainian medical professionals — the program’s third — arrived in New Haven in early October.
Dr. Volodymyr Vovk poses for a portrait in Lviv. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
### ‘People joined us’
Gromadskyi, the Ukrainian soldier, was the first patient to benefit from some of the training Chornopyshchuk received at Yale. When Gromadskyi arrived in Vinnytsia, he was suffering from deep necrosis on his bones, his spine, his arms and his abdominal wall.
While in Connecticut, Chornopyshchuk had learned some specialized techniques for treating complications of burn injuries and skin grafting. “It was interesting to see, to analyze and to study any new methods of prevention, scar formation, and surgical and non-surgical methods of corrections,” he said.
Using new methods for removing necrotic areas and closing up wounds, Chornopyshchuk said his team was able to heal the wound in a shorter timeframe.
Chornopyshchuk and his fellow doctors in the program are still in contact with the physicians they trained with in Connecticut.
Across the country from Donetsk, in Lviv, Dr. Volodymyr Vovk has been deploying a surgical skin grafting technique he learned from Yale faculty called “free flap.” The technique is often used in complex operations like trauma reconstruction.
“This knowledge that we took from this hospital and university, we implement in Ukraine, and not only in practical cases, but also in educational and scientific work,” Vovk, a craniomaxillofacial surgeon and professor, said.
During his time in Connecticut, Vovk studied at Yale New Haven Hospital with Dr. Suresh Mohan. A plastic surgeon focusing on the face, head and neck, Mohan has been practicing at Yale New Haven Hospital**** for three years.
Dr. Suresh Mohan at Yale School of Medicine. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
Mohan said having the eyes of so many visiting physicians on him during complex surgeries was tense at times. During one procedure, he was searching for a nerve in the patient’s face that, once transferred, would allow the patient to regain the ability to smile.
“I was dissecting, dissecting and finally I dissected one place and stimulated, the whole face moved,” Mohan said. “You felt this huge sigh of relief in the whole room… They were watching, and they were right there with you. It wasn’t just this disconnected presence,” he recalled.
A few months after that surgery, Mohan reunited with Vovk in Ukraine where he performed nearly 15 operations on blast injury patients at Superhumans Center, a surgical facility in Lviv’s outskirts. Mohan traveled with two other American doctors, as part of DU4U.
Mohan, who has performed surgeries in places like Haiti and India, said Ukraine was unique. “I think the urgency and intensity with which the circumstance has presented itself was very, very different. It’s different when your safety feels threatened. I think when that is the underlying current, it really shapes everything else that you’re doing.”
Mohan said his experience with gunshot wounds gave him a baseline of experience. “In New Haven, we have our share of gun violence, but this is trauma at a whole other level,” he said. “We don’t see that level of ballistic trauma here.”
A memorial on Kyiv’s Independence Square displays thousands of flags and photos in memory of fallen soldiers. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
In the years since DU4U launched, the organization has expanded its work on the ground in Ukraine. The first year, the program sent intensive care providers. The second year, reconstructive surgeons traveled to the war zone. The latest group comprises two psychiatrists, four anesthesiologists focused on pain management and two OB/GYN doctors.
“Nobody left, and people joined us,” Vash-Margita said. “What is inspiring is that it’s not even people who are Ukrainians, or have Ukrainian heritage. It’s Americans. It’s people who have no ties to Ukraine, but they feel that this is the right cause, and they join and they do work.”
_Liubov Sholudko and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting in Ukraine._
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