From dehydration to psychosis, what Sacramento nurses saw at the Ukraine border

Four months into the invasion of Ukraine, the American public still favors sanctions against Russia, but not if they come at a cost. And they were always going to come at a cost, driving up oil and food prices globally. In fact, the war is a disaster for every country in the world, especially in Africa.

Yet if “peace” means allowing Ukraine’s borders to be redrawn by force — and rewarding the war criminal who thinks he’s Peter the Great come back to life — it will only guarantee more aggression.

On a human level, the need in Ukraine hasn’t abated just because we no longer wake up every day hoping President Volodymyr Zelensky has survived another night. This week, Russian forces are closing in on two key eastern cities, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, in the Donbas region’s Luhansk Province.

With Zelensky begging the world for aid that he says is a “matter of life and death” for his country, we asked several Sacramento nurses with firsthand experience in the region to help their fellow Americans remember what’s at stake.

The nurses, from Mercy General Hospital, traveled to Romania and Poland in the spring to translate for Ukrainian refugees. Dina Kalinyuk, a Ukrainian-born surgical nurse, saw women and children arriving at the border in shock. Particularly among the old and very young, many were dangerously dehydrated after days of travel. They had avoided drinking anything en route so as not to have to stop on mined roads to go to the bathroom.

She also saw people in full-blown psychosis because they hadn’t been able to take their medication. One woman started running back toward the border screaming, “Take me back home so they can shoot me!” Her 11-year-old son “was emotionless, not even wiping his nose and not reacting to anything.” A Hungarian psychiatrist followed the woman and was able to turn her around, remarking, “’We’ve been seeing this a lot.’ It’s very disturbing, and I don’t know how that child will be OK.”

Of course our attention has waned, said 37-year-old Kalinyuk. “People get used to things,” no matter how horrible. “It’s our human nature.”

But the need is still overwhelming, especially for food, medicine and diapers. When Kalinyuk returned to Sacramento, she said, “Someone asked me, ‘Is there any waste’’’ of the aid that is being distributed? No, she said, you give a person a bag of food, and “they say, ‘I don’t need all of it. I’m just by myself.’ So no, there is no waste.”

Another of the Sacramento nurses, Ina Demchuk, said that most of us, here and elsewhere, “don’t understand how horrific it is. Literally people are starving to death in their basements.” When the war is over, she hopes to go back and “help with all that’s left.”

Meanwhile, Vita Paddubna, an oncology nurse, thinks often about those she saw arriving on foot, “dragging the luggage that was all they had.” She wonders about the little boy of 3 or 4 years who had become separated from his mom, whom Paddubna was able to locate, luckily.

And what about those whose moms were not found? Wherever there is chaos, there is also both an outpouring of compassion and crime of the worst kind: “I could see how human trafficking would be possible there.”

Paddubna, who is 24, worries about what’s become of the Ukrainian woman in her late 20s who broke down as she recounted the hardest decision of her life. With bombs falling all around her, she left her parents hiding in a bunker in Kharkiv, which was under even more vicious attack on Wednesday. Would she stay and die with them? No, but leaving was terrible, too.

Before the war, she told Paddubna, she had worked at a gas station where she got to know many of the police officers who worked nearby. “They’re all dead now,” she said. “A house, money, you can get those things back, but what about my friends?’’

And what about the “obvious drug addict with track marks” and three kids, ages 5, 8 and 12, the oldest of whom had been caring for the other two and for her mother? The woman kept asking volunteers like Paddubna, “Can you guys just take care of my kids? I need to go back to Ukraine.” They persuaded her to stay and rest for at least one night, hoping she would feel differently by morning. But what happened to her family then?

Unlike these nurses, we haven’t seen Putin’s handiwork up close. But we can thank them for their service to humanity by responding to the suffering they will never forget.