White scrubs covered in blood: the Okhmatdyt doctor whose photos stunned all of Ukraine – photos

Photos from the Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital in Kyiv flooded social media in the hours following the Russian missile strike on 8 July. Hospital staff joined emergency service workers, municipal workers and volunteers in clearing away the debris and treating the victims of the attack. Oleh Holubchenko, a paediatric surgeon from Okhmatdyt, was among them.

The photos in which he is dressed in blood-stained white scrubs stunned social media users. Ivan Stepurin, a representative of the Public Council at the Kyiv City State Administration, said that Holubchenko was performing a surgery when the Russian missiles struck.

Photo: Ukraine's Ministry of Health on Facebook

"The blast wave pushed him onto the operating table, but he and his colleagues, including the anaesthesiologist Yaroslav Ivanov, managed to do everything that was needed to switch the baby to a manual ventilator. The surgery was completed at a different hospital.

The child survived," Stepurin said. Yurii Taranovskyi recognised Holubchenko in the photos and praised his professionalism on Facebook. "Oleh Holubchenko is the future of maxillofacial surgery in Ukraine, he has hands of gold.

Today he and his countless colleagues helped clear the debris after the Russian missile struck an Okhmatdyt building," Taranovskyi wrote.

Journalist Kristina Berdynskyh who reached the site of the Russian attack soon after it happened said that Holubchenko was trying to do everything he could to help the hospital and the victims of the attack. "He was doing everything he could to help the kids, their parents, and the hospital. He helped emergency workers clear away heaps of concrete, consoled his colleagues, and was constantly on the go, taking something to someone.

I couldn't talk to him because he didn't want to stop even for a moment," Berdynskyh said. Holubchenko graduated from the Crimea State Medical University named after Serhii Heorhiievskyi in Simferopol, where he trained as a paediatric surgeon. Holubchenko shares the outcomes of his successful maxillofacial surgeries on Instagram.

His young patients and their families are smiling in gratitude in many of those photos.

"Face is the first thing we encounter when we meet someone else. When we see someone's cleft lip or cleft palate, we might have an involuntary reaction. I think being able to change people's future so early in their lives is amazing!

It takes a lot of work from surgeons, who are giving a new life to both the kids and their parents," Holubchenko wrote in one of his posts. Eight children and 50 adults sustained injuries in the Russian missile strike on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv on 8 July. The majority of children patients were temporarily discharged from the hospital but some continue to be treated in Okhmatdyt premises that were not affected by the attack.

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