“Russians are fighting against elderly in diapers”. Where are the people from the bombed-out nursing home in Sumy now?
The beam of a flashlight catches a paper icon of the Virgin Mary on the wall, a small plush dog among a pile of medicines, a spoon that still has honey on it, a diaper on the bedside table...
“The Russians are fighting against the elderly in diapers,” Liudmyla Krasylnykova, director of the Sumy Geriatric Nursing Home, tells me, where the Russians launched a guided bomb on September 19.
Prior to that, the administration of the institution conducted a survey almost every month to see if the patients agreed to the evacuation, and every month the unanimous answer was no.
Somewhere on the higher floors was Kateryna's room.
“I have it all covered with embroidered towels. Volunteers brought me needles and canvas, and I embroidered them,” the 86-year-old woman boasted to me.
But after the shelling, the room with towels, like the rest of the building, was left in ruins. So people just had to choose where they wanted to evacuate. They were offered a choice of Krolevets, Okhtyrka, Kyiv, etc.
Some of the 221 residents were taken by relatives, and several dozen were placed in social institutions in Kyiv and the Khmelnytskyi region. However, most of the residents of the nursing home ended up in nursing and retirement homes in the Sumy region, which continues to be actively shelled by the enemy and from which entire settlements are being evacuated.
Why were these completely defenseless people not taken to safer areas? What do the patients themselves think about this? What kind of care can the state provide to lonely elderly people today? To get answers to these questions, hromadske went to Sumy region.
In a stranger's house
“We are almost next door to the Belgorod region. In the event of a Russian offensive or very intense shelling, we were supposed to evacuate to Sumy, but it turned out that we took in 21 people from a Sumy nursing home,” says Viktor Tokar, director of the Okhtyrka Nursing Home for the Elderly.
“We were well accommodated here, two in a room. But the toilet was in the corridor, not in the room, as it was in Sumy, and we couldn't find it at first. We had bathtubs and showers in our rooms, but here everything is in the corridor, there are always queues,” says Kateryna Tymofiivna.
Her common-law husband, 77-year-old Viktor Ivanovych (“Oh, we're not officially married, so we were afraid to ask to share a room,” she laughs), speaks briefly about life in Okhtyrka: “Everything is in order here.”
Kateryna Tymofiivna shows us a small green cup — she was holding it when the bomb hit the nursing home, and she came to Okhtyrka with it. Her belongings, which the nurses managed to collect from the destroyed room, have already been brought from Sumy. Except for the embroidered towels.
Seven people with disabilities were brought from Sumy to the Chernechchyna inpatient care unit in the Okhtyrka district. The hospital is designed for 30 people and had 27 patients, so four Sumy residents had to be accommodated in the assembly hall.
Beds were set up there, and bags with the belongings of Sumy residents were stacked in the corner. Behind the belongings are piles of food supplies. Only a portrait of Shevchenko on the wall reminds us that the room used to be an assembly hall.
Ivan Yakovych has a first-grade disability, and after a stroke, the left side of his body is numb. Rescuers carried him out of the nursing home in their arms along with a wheelchair.
Mykhailo Ivanovych has a second grade and suffers from atherosclerosis. His leg was amputated. His prosthesis, walker, and new wheelchair remained in Sumy.
“I feel bad about the prosthesis, it's old, but I don't have another leg. The toilets here are new, obviously expensive, but in the corridor, not in the room. The cubicles are cramped, I can't get into the cubicle on a wheelchair, I have to jump to the toilet, there are no handrails, it's hard for me here,” says Mykhailo Ivanovych.
“They feed us very well here, but the garden is small, there is nowhere to go for a walk, and there is nowhere to take the boys outside. In Sumy, we had a huge park,” Anatolii Anatoliiovych laments. He has a second-grade visual disability.
As of September 19, there were 10 free beds in the Sinevske nursing home for the elderly. But 40 residents were brought from a Sumy nursing house.
“We accommodated 28 people in the premises of our old outpatient clinic. There hadn't been any appointments there for three or four years because a new one had been built in the village. We washed everything there overnight, cleaned it up, and set up beds,” says Olha Semylit, director of the Synivka nursing home.
18 of those brought to Synivka are bedridden with yellow-gray faces and seem to be completely unresponsive to the journalist and photographer. I feel embarrassed: they should be in complete peace in a warm, bright room, not lying on beds that are tightly pushed together.
“I really want to go outside, but they don't take me out, I don't know where my wheelchair is,” Mr. Mykola tells me in one of the rooms of the outpatient clinic. Both of his legs were amputated due to gangrene.
His roommate, Mykola Mykhailovych, also confidentially tells us that he really wants to bathe, but there is no shower here...
Not only is there no shower in this outpatient clinic, but in the first days after the move, hot water for washing the bedridden patients was heated in a kettle. Now, fortunately, there is a boiler. As for walks, someone has to carry a wheelchair with a patient outside, and there was never a ramp at the old outpatient clinic...
Duty at the side of the elderly
According to Viktor Tokar, if he could find 2-3 nurses to work at the Okhtyrka nursing house to take care of the residents, everything would be more or less fine. But so far, none of the locals want to do such hard work for a minimum wage.
To better care for the evacuees, Chernechchyna hospital added a half-time dishwasher and a half-time cleaner.
And in Synivka, staff from a Sumy nursing home comes to look after the evacuees. The women work in shifts of one week each: a medical nurse, two caregivers, and a nurse who delivers food.
“We do all the cooking, laundry, and dishwashing in our boarding house, and the direct care, feeding, and washing of the Sumy patients is done by the shift workers at the outpatient clinic,” explains Olha Semylit, director of the Synivka nursing home.
The staff from Sumy was given a room in the outpatient clinic to sleep and keep their belongings, and they are managing somehow. They don't want to give up going to Synivka, lest they lose their jobs.
“My family understands me. My husband said: if your colleagues are all going, you go too. He himself has a disability, but he says that God will give him health if I help here. And our patients are like children. It would be hard for them to get used to other nurses — they would wither away, just like the transplanted trees,” Svitlana, the nurse, tells me. Suddenly, tears stream down her cheeks.
Staff and premises for evacuees are only part of the problem. The patients from Sumy still need to be fed. And the costs for this were not provided for in Synivka, Okhtyrka or other places.
“People from Sumy gave 75% of their pension to a Sumy nursing home for their own maintenance. Their September money remained in Sumy, and they arrived here on September 20, and we are feeding them at our own expense, with our own food. Perhaps in October we will receive their pension money, but maybe not.
Before the Sumy patients arrived, we had 90 patients, now we have 130. The food we used to divide among 90 people is now divided among 130. Previously, we had 57 hryvnias per person per day for food, and now, accordingly, even less.
We have a subsidiary farm with 32 cows. We have our own meat, milk, and we grow some vegetables, and we have a cellar full of canned goods, so we will survive somehow. We don't even have enough money to pay the minimum wage for our staff, because it has increased over the year. I hope that we will be reallocated the money from the Sumy nursing home,” shares the director of the Synivka nursing home.
Shelter for life
"When it hit us on September 19, I shook off the glass and started sweeping it out onto the balcony. The nurses were shouting for us to leave our rooms, but I didn't want to go to the shelter, I locked myself in the room from the inside. So the rescuers then broke down the door to get me — I was the last one taken from the floor. I didn't know that they were going to take us away, I was hiding to avoid going to the shelter,” says Raisa Oleksandrivna, who was evacuated to the Okhtyrka nursing house.
Liudmyla Kostiantynivna, the director of the Sumy nursing home, patiently explains to me that social protection institutions are not prisons, and the residents are not prisoners. No one can force them to evacuate or go to a shelter. Raisa Oleksandrivna still does not go down to the shelter in Okhtyrka, even though she survived the horror of the Sumy shelling.
The shelter in the Okhtyrka nursing home is in the basement. It has two exits, a toilet, water and food supplies, and can accommodate up to 50 people. A metal staircase leads from the street to the basement. It is very difficult for a person with a walker or a cane to get down there alone.
“How am I going to put the bedridden patients in such a shelter? They will die if we start carrying them back and forth after each alarm,” says Viktor Tokar, director of the Okhtyrka nursing home, openly indignant.
No one will take the patients from the Synivka outpatient clinic to the shelter either, as it is more than 300 meters away.
In the Chernechchyna inpatient care unit, the shelter is being arranged in a special room — a concrete cube without windows, similar to apartment bomb shelters in Israeli homes. According to Tetiana Skyba, a nurse at the hospital, they started building it last year, and it will have toilets, showers, and beds for the bedridden patients. Someday in the future.
According to Liudmyla Musiiaka, director of the Sumy Regional Department of Social Protection, shelters in social institutions in the region are designed for temporary stay in case of air raid.
“It's impossible to take bedridden patients down there. There is no staff to do this, and no one will have time to move them before the shelling starts, and it will be difficult for the patients themselves. And these alarms are one after the other — you can't get through them. By all rights, bedridden patients should live in a shelter. But in the current conditions it is impossible. There should be entire underground hospitals. And our facilities were designed without taking into account such needs,” the director of the department states.
Why were they left at the border?
According to Liudmyla Musiiaka, after the shelling of the Sumy nursing home, the regional authorities asked other regions to take in the evacuees. Some replied that they had no free beds, while others demanded to pay for the maintenance of the evacuees.
"The monthly cost of a person's stay in a nursing house in our region is on average 13 thousand hryvnias. For their maintenance in other regions, we will have to pay several million hryvnias from our budget every month. And we are a frontline region, and the money goes to defense. But even if we find the money, the mechanism for transferring funds from our regional budget to the budget of another region is quite complicated. And this financial problem will be a matter of more than one day,” explains Liudmyla Musiiaka.
According to her, it was possible to evacuate 48 people to Kyiv and the Khmelnytskyi region thanks to purely personal contacts of the regional leadership and the intervention of high officials.
"Requesting to go to other regions means exposing your colleagues there to trouble. Let's say there are no free beds in a nursing home. So they need to deliver extra beds to the rooms. And this is a violation of the standards for the provision of relevant services. And what will the National Social Service or the Human Rights Ombudsman, who will come to inspect the institution tomorrow, say about this?” asks the director of the Sumy Regional Department of Social Protection.
In her opinion, it is long overdue to harmonize the norms and standards of social protection with the realities of martial law. But these issues are being resolved in Kyiv, not in Sumy.
So maybe it's worth finding vacant buildings in other regions and adapting them for a nursing home? According to Musiiaka, the Ministry of Social Policy offers lists of such buildings. But tens of millions of hryvnias need to be invested in their repair.
“And why would our region spend money on repairing a building that belongs to another region? And it is also inefficient for the owners of the premises to repair them and adapt them to our needs. These are not their needs,” the official concludes.
So it's easier for everyone to keep the elderly under the constant threat of shelling?
We want to go home
“Do you know whether we will be returned to Sumy soon?” elderly men and women in Okhtyrka, Chernechchyna, and Synivka looked hopefully into my eyes.
“Everything there needs to be repaired. The building is being prepared for conservation, and the broken windows and doors are being covered,” I honestly recounted what I heard from the director of the Sumy nursing home, Liudmyla Krasylnikova.
Currently, she is looking for a building in Sumy region to relocate the Sumy nursing home to. One of the options is a school in the village of Podilky. The building there has not been used for a long time because there are few local children, and they go to school in neighboring Synivka.
“If international donors join in and help with the repairs, we can go to Podkilky. We need to re-equip the school for the life and needs of the elderly patients. I want my patients to have the same comfortable conditions as in Sumy,” Liudmyla Krasylnikova tells me.
On the contrary, during our conversation, Liudmyla Musiiaka outlines the southwestern districts of Sumy region, which border Chernihiv and Poltava regions, on a map of Sumy region hanging in her office. She says that Russian artillery does not reach these areas, and as for missiles, no one is safe from them.
In this relatively safe zone, the official proposes to set up small (up to 30 people) social welfare institutions on the basis of local communities (such as the hospital in Chernechchyna) to care for lonely elderly and disabled people.
“These can be modular houses. For example, if there are 10 bedridden patients for 30 patients, it will be much easier to move them to the shelter than when it comes to large institutions with a large number of bedridden patients,” assures the director of the department.
But the realization of these plans is not in the near future.
The material was created with the support of Mediamerezha.