Teacher turned doctor Rina Reznik has been saving lives on the Ukrainian frontline since the Russian invasion began in 2022.
It takes Rina Reznik a few moments to remember her life before February 24, 2022, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
She smiles shyly and begins. “I can’t remember. I don’t remember what my life was like three years ago. What were my interests? How did I think?”.
When Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Rina Reznik was a school biology teacher while working on her degree.
It has now been almost three years sinceshe serves in different brigades of the Ukrainian army, evacuating soldiers from the front line, providing necessary first aid and saving lives.
Euronews met her in Brussels, where she came to participate in a closed-door event on the consequences of the war on the Ukrainian health system.
“Europeans generally like to talk about work-life balance. In Ukraine, we don’t know what balance between life and war is. All life is sacrificed in this war”she says.
“I don’t think Europeans completely understand. Just like I didn’t understand the many Syrian refugees in my town, Kharkiv, when I was a teenager. We talked a lot about Syrian refugees, but I didn’t understand exactly what they had been through.”adds the doctor.
Three years of emergency evacuations on the front line
When asked how she feels about hearing about the “war fatigue” that could set in outside Ukraine, especially in Western countries, Rina Reznik responds that the real fatigue is what Ukrainians feel today, almost three years after the start of the war.
“I really want to draw attention to the fatigue we feel. This goes for soldiers, surgeons, officers and others”she declares.
All these people, according to the young woman, feel extremely tired, but they can only rest if they are injured and need time for physical rehabilitation.
“No other country has experienced such a high number of casualties in its civilian health system”she emphasizes.
To illustrate her point, Rina Reznik says she spoke a few weeks ago with representatives of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center of the American military health system, where 2,000 prostheses have been distributed over the past two decades for American war veterans.
“It’s enough for two months in Ukraine”she says.
L'”blood ambassador of the Ukrainian army
In recent years, Rina Reznik has spoken out in favor of far-reaching reforms of the Ukrainian health system, especially in the field of combat medicine.
She believes, however, that these reforms will extend beyond Ukraine’s borders, as each war changes the rules and standards of combat medicine, especially regarding blood transfusions on the battlefield.
“Blood was reinvented in Vietnam and Korea, in World War II, in Iran and Iraq, and so it is obvious that in Ukraine we also need to reinvent blood on the battlefield.”she says.
The frontline landscape in Ukraine is more complex today than it was in previous wars. “Our front line is huge. We need many units of blood, hundreds. How to transfer it? How to store it? How to use it?”
However, some changes were implemented despite complicationsand Rina Reznik smiles proudly: “My chief doctor performed a blood transfusion 200 meters from a front line, 200 meters from the enemy. This is a victory for us”.
Helping those who help others
Ukraine’s medical professionals and combat medics have themselves faced enormous pressures in nearly three years of war. What they experience day after day an impact on their own health and, more particularly, on their mental state.
“You just can’t remember the faces of the people you’ve treated throughout the day. There can be hundreds of them a day. And a lot of them have very serious injuries, a lot of broken bones. And you can’t save everyone”she emphasizes.
The scariest word in the vocabulary of Ukrainian military doctors is “triage”, says Rina Reznik, because “you must choose who you will save now and who will wait for your help”.
“Combat medics feel like they can no longer work at the same level as before, they sometimes don’t have enough time to care for each casualty, and they don’t even have time to think about what to do next”.