This bus is all about “How are you, buddy?”

Ukrainian article of the week published in the 47h edition of the "What about Ukraine" newsletter on September 26th, 2024. The article was written by Kateryna Zarembo for The Ukrainians and was translated for n-ost by Natalia Volynets.

An unexpected meeting through time and space; a coin flipped by an invisible hand: is it life or death? Paramedic Kateryna Zarembo tells the story of the Hospitallers Medical Battalion’s rescue bus Austriyka.

The bus smells of heat and disinfectant, and through its window a Donbas dawn is rising. Ira is scrolling something on her phone. Gina is looking at the road while sitting in the aisle next to the driver. Yana, the eldest of the crew, is leaning her brow against the window, dozing. We are responding to our fourth call in two days. We would like some chilled Coke or coffee from a gas station, or some sleep, but we have no time for that now.

Seeing a familiar turn in the road, we start preparing the beds in the bus. We expect a full load: twenty-four wounded, six of them bedridden.

The emergency bus ‘Austriyka’, run by the Hospitallers Medical Battalion, answered its first call on 4 February 2023. It replaced the ‘Kraken’ bus, which suffered a serious road accident, causing the death of one of its doctors, Natalia Frauscher, who was nicknamed Austriyka. The Battalion named the new bus in her honour, and continues the cause of the fallen hospitaller.

Austriyka stops. The Red Cross cars carrying the wounded are awaiting us. The members of our crew hug the members of their crew, although we only saw each other ten hours before. During this time, we transported the previous group of wounded to hospitals, while the Red Cross team went to the hospitals in Druzhkivka and Sloviansk to pick up new cases.

The work is in full swing. Yana assigns beds and seats to the wounded. First, we bring in the seriously injured, connect them to monitors, check their blood pressure, heart rate, and saturation, and inspect the bandages. After the bedridden are placed in the bus, we welcome those able to sit.

We ask each of them how they feel: “Rate your pain on a scale from one to ten.” We need this evaluation to choose the medication for pain relief. A tired, half-grey man just frowns, as if to say: ‘No problem’. They are used to suffering pain at war. I tell him he no longer needs to endure it, for we are here to make sure they do not suffer anymore.

I help another wounded soldier to drink — I open a bottle and insert a plastic straw into the neck. He grasps it with his parched lips, takes a few small sips, and lets it go.

“Phew. I was so thirsty. I’m used to drinking only a little as the water is always scarce.”

I recall Maksym ‘Dali’ Kryvtsov, who died in the war on 7 January 2024, say: “God is the water you take with you on a mission, and there is never enough of it.”

The Austriyka has only nine seats, so we have to squeeze in. We apologise to the injured for the inconvenience. “No problem,” they laugh (and I note to myself: if they can laugh, nothing hurts them too much). “It’s definitely better than in the fortifications. It’s quite a resort here.”

When all the medical care possible is carried out and there is some time left, we help the wounded contact their relatives. Phones are often left behind before going on a mission, broken or lost, and few military personnel remember phone numbers by heart. Social networks come in handy. We are looking for wives, aunts, brothers and friends on Facebook and Instagram. We write messages and hope they will see them before we get to the hospital.

A young man with an amputation (as I look at his birth year in his the medical card, I see he is not yet thirty) repeats, persistently, like a revelation:

“I thought I wouldn’t get out. My eyes keep shutting constantly. I’m so happy to be alive.”

What are the right words of comfort we can use for them? Sometimes, the wounded we transport do not need such assurance: they are exhausted and are just sleeping, especially if pain does not bother them. However, sometimes, they ask us what will happen next, whether the doctors at the hospital assigned to them are good, or whether their limb can be saved. Here, we have to be careful with every word we use: it is important not to give them false hope, but still support them.

The Austriyka is about not sleeping when the clock shows it is night, but when we have the opportunity, so night for us can be any moment. The bus is on call at all times of the day, to receive the wounded coming out of hell, and to keep constant control of their indicators on monitors.

The bus is about “You’re safe,” “You’ll be taken care of,” and “We’re glad you’re here.” It is about “How are you, buddy?”

The Austriyka is about sensing how close the front is to us. The bus has long changed routes from where it took the wounded in early 2024. On the road, we see cars with trailers full of household goods. People leave their homes in frontline towns and villages and flee. A doctor from the Red Cross shows a picture on her phone, taken not far from the combat line: “The horizon is on fire,” she says. “That wasn’t the case before.” National and international media publish reports on the evacuation from Pokrovsk daily, while the Deep State map shows the advance of the enemy. Today, they are one kilometre closer.

The Austriyka is about dozens of people’s stories every day.

“I told them to leave me. No one’s waiting for me anyway,” says a fighter with multiple fractures hoarsely, and without pathos.

“Do you think he’ll be OK without an amputation?” I ask Yana about another wounded man who spent many hours with a tourniquet and failed conversion. A few days later, I find out that he was lucky: the Dnipro doctors decided to fight rather than choose the easier way. These are stories with a happy end. But there are others.

During my time on the bus, I often thought that those whom we would evacuate two days later might not even be wounded yet. An unexpected meeting through time and space; a coin flipped by an invisible hand: is it life or death?

____________

The Austriyka transports and helps stabilise 379 wounded military personnel during the 17 days of our rotation. From its first day of operation until mid-September 2024, the Austriyka has saved 6,400 Ukrainian defenders.

Kateryna Zarembo is an associate analyst of the New Europe Centre; since June 2024, she has been a paramedic of the Hospitallers Medical Battalion.

The Battalion consists of volunteer doctors and operates solely on public donations. Support the Hospitallers here.