When Ulana Suprun, an American doctor with Ukrainian roots, came to Ukraine from Detroit with her husband last November to support the EuroMaidan Revolution, she did expect to stay so long.
She was going to leave in February, after the democratic uprising ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. But Russia’s takeover of Crimea and hostilities in the east changed her plans. She decided to stay and help Ukrainian soldiers defending the nation against the Russian-backed war. “When I heard that Russia invaded Crimea, I realized that this is the war against the external enemy and that I will stay here to help as much as I can,” she says.
Suprun
works as a director of humanitarian initiatives at the Ukrainian World
Congress, the umbrella organization that counts 22 million Ukrainians living
abroad. She works nearly around the clock to provide medical aid to Ukrainian
soldiers.
Over the
last six months Ukrainian diaspora in the West has been providing professional
help with the necessary first aid training programs and medical equipment for
soldiers. “We have already trained over 3,500 soldiers in the Military Tactical
Combat Casualty Care and Combat Lifesaver courses,” Suprun says. “We have given
out more than 3,000 of improved the first aid kits to our soldiers.”
The
diaspora’s large-scale assistance could have been even larger but for bureaucratic
obstacles, Suprun complains. She had to pay 30 percent duty to import the first
250 kits at the beginning of June. Since Ukrainian legislation prohibits the
import of uncertified medicine from abroad one can either pay the duty or
provide customs with the list of required documents which are difficult to get.
”It took me more than three weeks to import the humanitarian first aid kits
duty-free,” Suprun says.
Her
explanation is simple – “these professional first aid kits can save many
lives.”
She knows
what she is talking about. Besides standing on Maidan, Suprun used her
expertise to help the injured protesters. She says she will never forget Feb.
18 – 20, the darkest days of the Ukrainian revolution when around 100 protests
were shot by snipers as she did surgeries in the Kyiv City
hall building. “There we so many
wounded those days that we put them in hallways. There was little we could do then
because we had no surgical instruments, no surgical table, no anesthesia,
nothing at all,” she says.
In order to
help the soldiers, the subtle woman fights severely with government offices in
Kyiv – all the efforts to get the government to ease import of professional
first aid kits.
The head of
Information and Public Relations department of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society
Viktor Shcherbaniuk says that roughly 80 percent of the deaths on the
battlefield result from blood loss. “If you have arterial bleeding on the
battlefield you have only 3 minutes to put a tourniquet not to die (because of
bleeding). The professional NATO kits that we import from the U.S. are
designed for a soldier to survive (in case of inquiry) before he is taken to
the hospital,” Suprun says.
The Azov
battalion soldier Georgiy, who did not want to disclose his last name for
safety reasons, had an opportunity to test such NATO kit, which he used in the
battle near Ilovaysk last month to save a life of his colleague Roman Sokurenko
by putting bandage and tourniquet on his wound. “These little kits save
people’s lives. If we had more such
kits, more soldiers could be saved after the battle,” he said adding that his
battalion has only one such kit per five soldiers.
Although
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree on Aug. 6 to remove restrictions on certification of medicines needed by the army the volunteers still experience
difficulty in importing humanitarian medical aid to Ukraine.
“I learn about new requirements (for customs clearance of medicine imports)
every time I come to the customs office to pick up a new portion of kits,”
Suprun says adding that they plan to supply 5,000 soldiers with these till
winter.
The lady is trying to convince the country’s military authorities to
supply the army with improved kits as well as to introduce first aid trainings by
Western professionals as part of soldiers’ military training. The officials say
they like her ideas but do little about it.
Two months ago she made a presentation of an improved first aid kit in
the health ministry and the parliament’s committee on national security and defense. “Military officials
agreed that these are very effective kits and the government should buy them
for soldiers. Yet on Aug. 19 the health ministry’s state inspectorate for
quality control of medicines registered four types of military first aid kits
of the old Soviet model,” Suprun says. Those Soviet kits cannot help save lives
in a warzone, experts say. Svoboda lawmaker Yuriy Syrotiuk called the decision
to buy the Soviet type of first aid kits “corruption.” “The health ministry
gets bribes for the decision. Only the prime-minister or the president can
change the system,” he said. The health ministry did not respond to Kyiv Post’s
request for comment.
Despite the obstacles, Suprun is full of energy and plans to launch a
couple of new trainings for medical staff who work in war zone. “We just want
to protect the patriots who defend all of us,” she says.
Ulana Suprun can be reached at patriotdefence.org
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be
reached at [email protected]
