When German Chancellor Angela Merkel came to Ukraine the day before Independence Day, she brought a promise that 20 of the most severely injured soldiers would go to Germany for treatment at her government's expense.
An elated President Petro Poroshenko announced the offer at a briefing on Aug. 23, the day of her visit, and said that Germany was “a friend in need” and “a friend indeed.” But as 20 Ukrainian soldiers flew off to foreign hospitals on Sept. 2, Ukrainians were left fuming because Germany did not fully meet its commitment.
German doctors who arrived to Ukraine to help transport the soldiers rejected 17 seriously wounded candidates for treatment abroad. Instead, they picked those who were less seriously wounded and who required shorter rehabilitation periods, according to Vitaly Andronaty, Ukraine’s chief military doctor.
“German doctors came and said ‘We won’t take them’,” Andronaty says. “So, it was not us (Ukrainians) who dictated the terms.”
Merkel’s chief press officer Steffen Seibert did not respond to multiple requests for comments.
Ukraine’s doctors had selected 22 candidates who were “most severely wounded,” as per agreement, including some who were injured in a recent battle of Ilovaisk, where Ukraine’s army and volunteer battalions were trapped for days under Russian shelling. More than 100 died in that trap.
Olga Bohomolets, a recently appointed medical adviser to Poroshenko, said on her Facebook page that the soldiers who had been picked by Ukraine’s doctors for the offer “need urgent treatment and surgery that cannot be provided in Ukraine.”
According to Andronaty, the German doctors said that the servicemen chosen by Ukraine required excessively expensive and difficult treatment, so they opted for those with lighter injuries. He said that the German doctors only accepted five of the soldiers proposed by Ukraine and selected the rest themselves.
But the head of the German medical team, Col. Dr. Axel Hoepner, said Germany simply chose those soldiers who do not require a long rehabilitation period. “They had to fit an adequate timeframe – from three weeks up to six to 12 months,” he said.
Lev Golik, deputy head of the the Kyiv Military Hospital, where the soldiers had been treated before Germany, confirmed by phone that the chosen patients did not require long rehabilitation.
There were other criteria for selection, Col. Dr. Hoepner said. The injured soldiers also had to be matched with the skills of doctors working at the hospitals to which they were sent, he said.
Boris Nannt, a spokesman for Germany’s
Defense Ministry, elaborated on the criteria.
“The
selection criteria for (the soldiers’) transportation to Germany were the severeness
of the injuries in conjunction with the availability of compatible treatment
and the capacity of Ukrainian hospitals,” he said by e-mail.
The German military hospitals where the servicemen are being treated are specialized in handling emergency cases and
plastic surgery, Nannt said.
Andronaty, Ukraine’s chief military doctor, complained that the German doctors had changed the locations to which the servicemen were to be transferred.
“We were first told that they would be sent to the best clinics, but they were sent to military hospitals,” he said, adding that these were located in Berlin, Hamburg and Koblenz.
But officials at German embassy in Kyiv, as well as Ukraine’s own volunteers who took part in the project, say that, in fact, military hospitals are best equipped to treat war-time injuries and are “among the best in Germany.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
