“They Gave Us Drugs Used Only in Veterinary Medicine”: How the Russians Tried — and Failed — to Take Over a Children's Hospital in Kherson
The Kherson Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital is a critical institution for the city and the entire region. With no other municipal pediatric hospitals in Kherson Oblast, it is the only place where children from all the region can receive specialized medical care.
From the very first days of the full-scale invasion, the hospital found itself under occupation. Yet it never stopped operating — not for a single day — despite shelling and power outages. The hospital’s director, Inna Kholodniak, refused to collaborate with the Russians, forcing her to go into hiding and manage the facility remotely until the city was liberated.
Inna Kholodniak shared her tactics for dealing with the occupiers, explained why some children had to be sent to Simferopol, and recalled how the Russians once delivered veterinary drugs to the hospital, claiming they were humanitarian aid for the patients.
The frontline is just over a kilometer away from the Kherson Regional Children’s Hospital. Beyond it lies the Dnipro River — and Russian troops on the opposite bank.
Today, despite ongoing shelling, the hospital keeps saving children’s lives — those injured by attacks, those who require complicated surgeries, and more. Medical teams also travel to liberated cities and villages across Kherson Oblast to provide medical assistance.
Before the full-scale war, no one at the hospital could have imagined that they would have to treat blast injuries.
"The hardest part is trying to understand why children have to suffer because of war," says hospital director Inna Kholodniak. "We used to think car accidents and street fights were terrible, that children should never be caught up in such things. And now — there is war."
Before the invasion, the hospital treated up to 18,000 children annually in its inpatient units and another 80,000 in its outpatient clinics, according to Kholodniak.
"Our hospital included a neonatal emergency team, and two intensive care units — one for newborns, the other for older children. We performed nearly 7,000 surgeries a year, starting from a child’s birth."
On February 24, 2022, the hospital had 1,200 staff members — doctors, nurses, drivers, administrative workers, accountants, lab technicians, kitchen staff, laundry workers, boiler room engineers, and oxygen plant operators. When the full-scale invasion began, about half of them remained. Today, only a third are still there.
"We worked under shelling, jets, and missiles overhead."
In December 2021, the Kherson Regional Children's Hospital celebrated its 70th anniversary. The following year, the team planned a major renovation. Then came COVID-19, and by February 2022, the hospital was filled with hundreds of children infected with the virus. Other departments were also full — both ICUs had critically ill patients, and the oncology and hematology unit housed over 20 children battling cancer.
Each hospital building had a basement shelter, but at the start of the war, these were nothing more than empty underground rooms — no beds, no medical equipment. There were no air raid sirens in Kherson at the time either. Doctors relied on the sound of explosions and updates from local Telegram channels.
"We worked under shelling, jets, and missiles overhead," says Inna Kholodniak, recalling the first days of the full-scale invasion. "Parents took home those children who no longer needed urgent care — at their own risk."
The constant need to move between patient rooms and bomb shelters led to tragic losses.
"In the neonatal ICU, we had premature babies who had to be carried back and forth," Kholodniak remembers. "They had very high chances of survival, but with the constant temperature changes, the cold oxygen… they didn’t make it."
People from the surrounding apartment blocks also sought shelter in the hospital’s basement. Some staff members brought their families and lived in the hospital. Managing everything was a challenge, and the future was unclear. No one knew what to do about food, medications, or oxygen, or whether supplies would last. To make things worse, the hospital was occupied almost immediately.
"The Russians crossed the Antonivskyi Bridge and entered the city right away — we didn’t even have a week of resistance. It was an occupation from the start, and leaving became impossible," Kholodniak says. "Later, they organized so-called ‘humanitarian corridors.’ But even then, Russian soldiers wouldn’t let ambulances through. So parents just put their kids in private cars and tried to escape Kherson however they could."
At that time, no one at the hospital truly understood what was happening. Everyone hoped the fighting would end soon and kept providing care for the children. Despite the occupation, the National Health Service of Ukraine continued to finance the hospital, ensuring that staff still received salaries.
The doctors also had to quickly learn how to treat war injuries — wounds caused by shelling and explosions. Since the start of the invasion, the hospital has treated over 150 such children — all of whom survived.
Kholodniak still remembers the first young patients wounded in the war. One was a boy from Chornobaivka, whose family had tried to flee but came under Russian fire. He suffered severe shrapnel wounds from shattered glass. Another was a child from Beryslav, who sustained burns when their home was shelled. Russian forces held the family at a checkpoint for two or three days before letting them through — by then, the child had barely survived.
For the first month of occupation, the Russians stayed away from the hospital.
Then they started showing up — offering so-called "humanitarian aid" in the form of medicine and baby food. Inna Kholodniak refused, telling them the hospital had enough supplies for three to four months. Then, one evening in April, she got a phone call.
"‘Representatives of the Russian Federation want to speak with you,’" Kholodniak recalls. "I said I had no interest in talking to them and hung up. Fifteen minutes later, armed soldiers in BTRs arrived with an FSB officer. ‘You were rude to a representative of the Russian Federation. Don’t you understand? We are here forever.’ That conversation led nowhere."
A week later, the occupiers returned. That time, they brought journalists and an even larger group of men. They demanded that Inna write a statement agreeing to cooperate with the Russian authorities. The conversation was conducted by an FSB officer, and there were also Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya) soldiers present. Inna remembers that the occupiers had all her information — her date of birth, place of study, and work history.
"They asked me what my friends in Crimea thought. I told them they were jealous — of our modern medical equipment, our treatment protocols, our ability to travel abroad for training. They’re still using the same ambulance in the regional children’s hospital — the one Ukraine bought. Meanwhile, we’ve already replaced ours three times because the new ones are better equipped. We all know that in Russia, proper healthcare only exists in Moscow and St. Petersburg."
The FSB agent tried a different tactic: he pointed out that paramedics in Russia earn more money than those in Ukraine.
Then he asked how she generally felt "about the current situation”.
"I said, 'Tell me, do you have a wife? Kids? If four men with rifles walked into your wife’s workplace and asked her how she feels about it — what would she say? We were planning to build a hospital, and you destroyed everything. And Russia is not the country anyone should look up to," Inna recalls her response to the occupier. "That’s how our conversation went," she adds. "I think he understood perfectly well that I would never agree to cooperate."
The next day, Kholodniak took her laptop, gathered all essential documents, and left the hospital.
The Russians promised to come back the next day. On April 11, Inna took her work laptop, gathered all essential documents, and left the hospital. From that moment on, she knew she would only return to her workplace when the Ukrainian flag was flying over Kherson again.
Rescuing Children from Occupation
While Inna Kholodniak refused to collaborate with the Russians, her deputy, Viktor Burdovitsyn, an anesthesiologist, agreed to take over as the hospital’s head under the Russian flag. Burdovitsyn had been honored as a Distinguished Doctor of Ukraine and, before the occupation of Crimea in 2014, had worked on the peninsula.
Kholodniak doesn’t recall him ever openly expressing pro-Russian views. However, in conversations, he would sometimes praise the Russian healthcare system. Shortly before Kherson’s liberation, Burdovitsyn fled to the left bank of the Dnipro River with the Russians. He is now charged with high treason, and his case has been transferred to the Malynovsky District Court of Odesa, with a hearing set for February 19, 2025.
On April 12, 2022, the Russians returned to the Kherson Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital, only to find that Kholodniak was already gone. They rummaged through everything left in her office and took documents containing personal data of police officers and military personnel.
"Next door is the Ministry of Internal Affairs hospital, and in the first days of the full-scale invasion, its director came to us," Kholodniak recalls. "He asked to store documents containing personal data of police and military officers in our hospital. We moved them quietly — I thought no one knew about it. But after a while, someone told Viktor Stepanovych [Burdovitsyn] about that. He called in the FSB, and they took away all those boxes of documents."
However, the hospital director only learned about this from the staff who stayed in the city. Eventually, many employees left occupied Kherson, taking their families with them. But some stayed, and the hospital continued providing care. For instance, the neonatal emergency team kept working, transporting newborns in critical condition from maternity hospitals to the children’s hospital. But even that was not without obstacles. The Russians interfered, telling doctors at checkpoints they had only 10 minutes to pick up the babies.
Some children couldn’t be helped in Kherson at all — those born with congenital heart defects. Even before the war, such children had been sent to Kyiv for surgery, as these procedures weren’t performed at the Kherson hospital.
"There was no way out," Inna remembers. "The children could be operated on in Simferopol. But the price of the transportation was the Russians' demand that the child be registered under Russian law. Otherwise, no one in Crimea would agree to treat them. So we would bring them to the town of Kalanchak, and from there, an ambulance from Simferopol’s regional children's hospital would pick them up."
Once, they did manage to evacuate children from the occupation. In April, an oncologist, together with the charity Tabletochki, took pediatric patients with oncological and hematological diseases to Poland for treatment.
"It was done with the parents’ consent, but it was a huge risk for the charity," Kholodniak recalls. "These children didn’t need equipment — only ongoing chemotherapy, which could not be interrupted. If we had tried to take them out in an ambulance, the Russians would never have let them through. So volunteers traveled with the children as ordinary civilians leaving Kherson — it took two or three days: first to Lviv, then to Poland."
Meanwhile, the Russians used the Kherson Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital as a propaganda stage. Their media came to film stories claiming that the doctors had abandoned their patients and that Kholodniak had lied about having enough medicine and food. They filmed themselves distributing "humanitarian aid."
"Russian propagandists told these stories about how wonderfully the 'rushists' were helping Ukrainian children. By 'helping,' I mean they 'generously' gave us Bicillin, which is used only in veterinary practice, and said it should be used for kids," Kholodniak says.
In reality, the hospital had a stockpile of medicines, and the supplies brought by the Russians often didn’t even fit the equipment. The hospital used modern equipment, while the Russians lacked proper components, including ventilators and neonatal incubators. Later on, Ukrainian volunteers also began helping with medicines.
"Sometimes someone would call and say they would bring medications," Inna recalls. "I would call department heads or nurses who were pro-Ukrainian and waiting for liberation. I’d say, ‘Tomorrow someone will come and bring the medicine. Distribute it quietly to the departments — don’t say who gave it to you or who called. No one needs to know any of that.’"
At the same time, Kholodniak was in hiding — staying with friends and trying to disguise herself on the streets with a cap and sunglasses. Russian soldiers searched her home, but neighbors never gave her away, even though they saw her returning for things. The occupiers came a few more times and then stopped. Inna never considered fleeing the city — she believed it would be even more dangerous than staying. And she never gave up hope that Ukrainian flags would soon return to Kherson.
"I was like a calming ideologist among my friends," she says with a smile. "I don’t know much about geography, but at that moment, I knew exactly where everything was, and I knew Kherson would be liberated. When? Today, tomorrow, the day after? Besides, the sounds of war never stopped. HIMARS were hitting the Antonivskyi Bridge and Russian positions. We always believed — maybe a month, maybe two — but Kherson would be free. And I’d have to go back to work! I have children, I have a team."
Even though Inna had to stay in hiding, she saw Kherson’s resistance with her own eyes. One day, she went to the market. A woman tried to pay a fish seller with rubles, but the seller refused.
"The woman ran off to get the commandant," Inna says with a smile. "And that fish seller, she just goes, 'Ladies, some catfish?' So my friend and I bought some, handed her the money, and kept standing there. Then the woman comes back with the commandant and armed men, saying that the seller refused to take her money. And the seller says, 'Who didn’t want to take money? Me? I wasn’t even here! What catfish? Did anyone see any catfish?' There were lots of people around, but no one said a word. And that was the end of it."
"A Celebration Like No Other"
In October 2022, staff at the Kherson Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital began receiving messages from Russian mobile operators ordering them to evacuate both equipment and children to the left bank of the Dnipro River. The same demands were made by the hospital’s so-called "chief doctor", appointed by the occupiers. The staff had to invent excuses to avoid following these orders.
"Some of the equipment, doctors took home; some we hid in storage rooms and closets," recalls hospital director Inna Kholodniak. "The ambulance drivers took out the batteries and deflated the tires. It was an enormous risk. As for the children, we told them their medical condition made evacuation impossible, that they couldn’t be transported. To make that believable, we placed ventilators next to some of the kids' beds — even those who didn’t need them. And in the end, not a single child, not a single piece of equipment, was taken out of the hospital by the Russians."
Inna remembers that just before Kherson’s liberation, fear was overwhelming. The city had no electricity, no running water, no communication, and no way of knowing what was happening. The hospital relied on generators, but even those could only power the ICU. Still, Inna remembers the day of liberation as an extraordinary moment.
"I don’t think we’ve ever seen a celebration like that," she says, smiling. "There were Ukrainian flags everywhere. Where did they even come from? I mean, at that time, every day we heard stories — someone's door was kicked in, someone was taken away, someone was tied up, someone was thrown in a basement. Russians could come into any apartment and search it. Yet, on the day of liberation, the number of Ukrainian flags was just mind-blowing."
With Kherson’s liberation came relentless shelling. The hospital was hit multiple times — in one instance, around 700 windows were blown out at once.
But the staff quickly cleaned up and repaired the damage. International organizations stepped in to help the hospital, making it possible to continue offering care in newly liberated parts of Kherson Oblast.
"We would get into an ambulance, put on body armor and helmets, and head out to different towns and villages," says Inna. "And there was neither electricity nor running water. We brought along an ultrasound machine, which we connected to a generator in the ambulance and examined patients right inside the vehicle. We also expanded telemedicine services."
After liberation, the Kherson Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital was equipped with a proper bomb shelter, complete with a mental health room, playroom, gym, operating room, and ICU ward. There are enough doctors now to fully staff the hospital.
Inna also notices how Kherson itself has changed. Despite constant shelling, people keep living their lives, maintaining the city’s spirit and doing everything possible to cover the basics. She believes attitudes toward Kherson have changed too:
"Before, people thought of Kherson as a small, provincial town famous for its watermelons, the sea, maybe a few other things. But now, it’s a city of brave, unbreakable people," Inna says. "During the occupation, no matter where you walked, you’d see messages like ‘Waiting for the Armed Forces of Ukraine,’ ‘Glory to the Armed Forces,’ and ‘Kherson is Ukraine.’"
