Why, where and with what injuries they were hospitalized, the editor of DW tells.
According to the Belarusian media and telegram channels, many military, wounded in battle, they are sent to Belarus, where they receive medical care and are taken further to Russia.
On March 1, self-proclaimed President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed this. He stated that during the five days of the war in Gomel, Mozyr and another regional center, which he did not name, 160-170 wounded Russian soldiers were treated.
Four sources confirmed to DW that since the beginning of the war, wounded Russian soldiers have been taken to hospitals in Mozyr and Gomel. A field hospital was also set up in Narovlya. According to one of DW's interlocutors, many of the wounded arrive in Mozyr. Often – “without arms, legs, ears, eyes.”
Some soldiers are brought from medical battalions with gangrene in violation of the evacuation deadlines: “If the soldiers were delivered on time, the limbs could be saved.”
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DW sources say that some of the patients admitted to them went without food for up to five days, they were disoriented, they had no idea where they were, they asked to call their parents.
“There are patients born in 2003 from poor regions of Russia. In fact , children. And the same victims,” says one of DW's interlocutors.
Another source – he is not directly connected with medicine, but is well aware of the situation – confirmed that in one of the hospitals in the Gomel region “operating rooms work non-stop”, up to 50 people can be operated on overnight. Among them are local residents with “civilian” diseases, and the Russian military. One of the most frequent surgical manipulations is amputation of limbs.
“The hospital is full,” says the source and asks to hide the location of the clinic.
Several DW sources also report that in Belarus is brought not only wounded, but also killed soldiers. But none of the interlocutors is able to estimate the scale of the death toll.
Many of the doctors contacted by DW refused to talk about providing medical care to the Russian military. According to two interlocutors, they took a non-disclosure agreement. What kind of subscription it is, in what form, what information it prohibits to disclose, the interlocutors refused to explain.
The Medical Solidarity Foundation notes that at present, hospitals in Gomel and Mozyr have become “virtually secure facilities.” “Everything is very tightly controlled, KGB or FSB officers are on duty right in the hospitals, all buildings are guarded,” the fund says.
“Many doctors were removed from the hospitals, who theoretically could tell something. Instead, Russians were brought in to work.”
The foundation says that in the first week of the war they occasionally received data on the number of wounded or the nature of their injuries. And then checks and dismissals began.
“Now many doctors and staff are afraid, they don’t communicate with anyone,” they say at the Medical Solidarity Foundation. “In principle, the flow of cargo 200 and 300 is endless, the hospitals are full, everyone who can is loaded onto trains and sent to Russia,” adds the representative of the fund.
From the point of view of international humanitarian law, helping the wounded in battle Russian soldiers are not complicity in hostilities, explains political scientist Sergei Bogdan, a researcher at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at the Free University of Berlin.
“Aid should be provided to all the wounded, no matter which army they belong. Moreover, both in the war zone and near it,” he clarifies.
True, there is a nuance: Russia officially does not consider what is happening as a war, says Bogdan. This means that the norms of international conventions do not apply in this case. So the status of the wounded Russian soldiers in Belarus is now unclear.
Recall that in Belarus, a missile attack on their territory was called a fake.
On March 11, Russian planes attacked Belarusian territory on the border with Ukraine.
