A brave Scots nurse volunteering in Ukraine has told how he witnessed the wreckage of a Russian tank with its gun still pointing directly at a hospital.
David Anderson saw the devastation inside a wrecked hospital in Trostianets, in eastern Ukraine, which came under tank fire.
David, from Montrose, volunteers with frontline aid charity UK-Med and has also worked on humanitarian missions in South Sudan, Myanmar and Lebanon.
He said: “We walked into one hospital and they said that 200 were there but it felt like more. There were people with traumatic amputations, flesh burns, blast injuries.
"The volume is astounding.”
There have been more than 130 attacks on healthcare facilities since Russia launched the invasion in February.
David, the charity’s humanitarian health advisor, added: “I find it unbelievable and depressing that a hospital would be deliberately attacked.
The tank is being guarded as evidence of a war crime. It had been blown up and its gun turret is still pointing at the hospital.
“I was shown round the wards and there was just devastation everywhere the tank shells had hit.”
David has been in Ukraine since March 14 and is proud that the UK is at the forefront of international support for Ukraine – including cash to help train doctors, nurses and paramedics on how to deal with mass casualties as well as setting up mobile health clinics.
He said: “I’ve never been involved in a crisis like this that is so close to home. You’re used to humanitarian deployments to conflict zones in Africa but I never expected to be doing this work in Europe.
“The spectre of war in Europe has not been something we’ve really had to consider in our lifetime.
“People are going on stag or hen weekends to Bucharest or Warsaw or booking holidays to the Balkans or Turkey and just a couple of hundred miles away you have this terrible thing unfolding.”
He said Ukrainian casualties are grateful for the UK’s support, adding: “Once you’re introduced as medics from the UK, despite having had their leg blown off or whatever, they are determined to shake your hand and say, ‘thank you for coming.’
Everything we do is taking a strain off the Ukrainian health system to help them cope with the horrific conveyor belt of war wounded.”
He pledged: “I’ll stay as long as it takes.”
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