Severely wounded in a mine blast, Oleksii “Kir” crawled through a red zone seeking rescue for almost a day. The zones from which it is impossible to evacuate the wounded have become larger.

Oleksii “Kir” was seriously injured and crawled to the zone from where medics of the 5th Assault Brigade eventually evacuated him. He was blown up by a mine and received an explosive injury, multiple shrapnel injuries, including to the face, lost one eye, and likely lost sight in the other.

Medics of the 5th Assault Brigade brought Oleksii to the stabilization point in an almost unconscious state.

“He is seriously injured, but he will live. He spent almost a day in the “red zone,” says Ruslan, “Murphy,” the senior shift doctor of the stabilization point on the Zaporizhzhia front.

The zones from which it is impossible to evacuate the wounded have become larger. The work of combat medics at stabilization points has become more complicated due to the intensity of enemy shelling and the use of drones by the Russians. 

Medics are increasingly having to work in conditions of limited time, limited resources, and the constant threat of strikes, which significantly increase the workload and risks for medical teams.

Author:[ https://www.instagram.com/maksymkishka/](https://www.instagram.com/maksymkishka/)

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Heroes.

Russia is a cancer not a country

Fuck… poor guy… hope he recovers the best he could…

I admire your strenght and your will to live, Kir. My respect.

We can now see on which side the god is.

Ukrainian combat medicine is one of the most astonishing, and understated, of Ukraine’s superpowers in this war.

The (very) rough rule of thumb is that the wealthier the country, and the deeper and more recent years of bitterly-earned institutional wartime experience, the better a nation’s combat medicine will be. A country like Ukraine, mostly at peace since its modern founding and without great wealth, would never have been expected to field a combat medical response system at the level of Western Europe or the United States.

But, first of all, what Ukraine did field was extremely effective, to an immediately noticeable extent. Right from the start of the 2022 invasion it became clear that Ukrainian battlefield casualties were just not dying at the same rate as Russians. By quite a big margin. And the thing is… you can’t just snap your fingers and acquire good combat medical doctrine or systems on the fly. You either start the war with them, or you don’t have them. Ukraine had committed the resources, the knowledge, and the talent, and it showed.

As in so many other ways, Ukraine had laid the groundwork long ago.

That was just the start though. You can’t just rapidly acquire years of institutional emergency medical knowledge, but you can rapidly lose it. Case in point: everything that was going on on the Russian side of the conflict, as combat survival plummeted after the first year.

But not Ukraine. That has been the second and more incredible thing — Ukraine’s capacity for sustaining the quality of its emergency medical response, despite the massive wartime drain on all resources, the ongoing losses of the war, and the viciousness of Russian attacks targeting medical responders and medical resources.