Members of the Chechen Vostok Battalion distinguished themselves in Tskhinvali. "Chechnya Vostok [Battalion Commander] Yamadaev," is written on the tank.
Photo: Valery Melnikov
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Doctors Take Over from Tanks
// A Kommersant correspondent in a Tskhinvali hospital
Yesterday, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared an end to the peacekeeping operation in South Ossetia, a mobile hospital was set up in Tskhinvali by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry. It immediately received 18 soldiers wounded in the night’s shooting as patients. Olga Allenova has the details from Tskhinvali.
The Emergencies Ministry field hospital was opened in the courtyard of the city hospital, with ten modern modules, doctors in white and nurses in green. The modules are sterile. Compared to the basement of the city hospital, where the wounded were treated until recently, the new hospital is heaven.
“The local doctors are simply heroes,” says the hospital’s chief doctor Valery Shabanov. “I saw the conditions they worked in. Brave people.”
In the critical care unit, there are three badly wounded soldiers. One of them is on artificial respiration. A nurse is carrying out bloody disposable sheets from the operating module. In the next module, there are three young men in bandages. Airplanes fly over the city and grenades are heard. They shoot from the city, while residents go about their daily business. The nurses head for shelter. They arrived just today and do not understand when shooting represents dander, and when it does not.
Eighteen wounded soldiers were brought in at night. Most of the wounded came from the village of Nikozi, where a fierce battle had gone on the day before. The wounded were 18-year-old conscripts who said they were ordered to Nikozi without even knowing that there were Georgians subdivisions there and they would have to fight.
“No one knew where to go,” one of the soldiers recounted. “We didn’t even have maps. There was a guy with me. They didn’t give him a machinegun. It turns out that they hadn’t even registered him with the unit before they shipped him out here. Today our commander sent him back to Vladikavkaz.”
The wounded say they received no training before being sent to South Ossetia. “They didn’t even tell us there was a war on,” one said. “They said it was a peacekeeping operation.”
One of them, Muslim, is from the Chechen Vostok special battalion. He was also brought in the evening before from Nikozi with a leg wound. When he was wounded, the armored personnel carrier had no tires, so the Vostok fighters went out, under fire, to get to the ambulance that was lagging behind and bring it in. The Russian soldiers praise the Chechens. “They stand by their own,” they observe. Muslim shakes his head and refers to the Russians as “finches.” “I don’t understand why they put the Russians first in the column and us at the end. It was always the other way around. And we were supposed to be first this time too. Then the losses wouldn’t have been so great,” he says.
I ask who was commanding Vostok in this operation. “Sulim, who else?” he answered. “Yamadaev. Our commander. He is with us all the time.”
I spoke with one of the senior officers from the staff of the North Caucasus Military District about Vostok the day before. “We didn’t expect them to behave themselves that way,” he said. “They were simply better by a head than all the rest. They didn’t have a single loss!”
“We are well trained,” Muslim said. “They transferred us here several months ago. Only trained soldiers should fight here. It’s a complicated place.” Half an hour after our conversation, Muslim and 16 other wounded soldiers were taken away from the hospital.
They receive first qualified care here and then we transfer them to a military hospital,” Shabanov explained. “If it is a civilian, we transfer them to hospitals in North Ossetia or other regions. You know, all the regions have responded and are ready to take in the victims.”
“Are there really such great losses here?”
“Well, I don’t know the numbers. I’m a doctor, not a politician. Here they’re bringing a wounded Georgian to me now. We’ll treat him, like all the others.”
The hospital has been accepting local patients on a walk-in basis since Thursday. The pharmacies in the city are closed and there are no medicines. The people emerging from the cellars complain of severe headaches and insomnia. The hospital can accept up to 300 people a day. On the road, a truck picks up a bag of dirty sheets. They are closing the basement of the city hospital. Someone set up a table with a sign on it reading “Drink to your health! Take Bread!” There were bottles of mineral water and bread in bags on the ground next to it.
I leave the hospital with local residents who had received humanitarian aid. “I was still sleeping in the cellar last night,” Nonna Khetagurova told me. “But now they say the war is over. Putin said so.”
“Not Putin, Medvedev,” I correct her.
“Well, Putin’s still the main one,” she returns. “They always betrayed us. Gorbachev, Yeltsin. We thought Putin would hand us over to the Georgians too. What took the Russians so long to get here? No one believed they were coming. Between bombings, we ran out of the cellar and looked at the Council of Ministers building. The Russian and Ossetian flags were flying. We saw that, if our flag is flying, it means the city is ours. Then we heard tanks coming, with squeaky tracks. I thought Russians. I went up and heard Georgian being spoken.”
Nonna begins to cry. Everyone has tears in their eyes all the time here, both women and men. The doctors say the local residents have severe depression.
Ahead of me, a gray-haired woman on crutches drags a container of water. Her arms and face were covered with soot. Irina Turaeva is 70. She does not want to leave the city, even though a tent city has been put up in Dzhava. “I was born here and I’ll die here,” she says. The women invite me to tea. “The first tea after the war,” Nonna jokes. They heat the water on a gas stove in the courtyard.
“I’m not going to wash yet,” Irina says suddenly. “What if they bomb again?”
“It’s all behind us,” her neighbor says soothingly. “Now we’re going to live.”
Olga Allenova
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 13, 2008
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