‘He should have lived’: shortages are proving fatal in Lviv’s hospitals

A child who needs a liver transplant and her mother at a hospital in Lviv. They have been displaced from the eastern city of Chernihiv. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For Dr Dmytro*, who has worked as a cardiologist in Lviv for 13 years, few crosses are harder to bear than the death of a child – the loss of a patient whose life still lay before them – even when he knows there is nothing more he could have done.

But while all children’s deaths weigh heavily on his mind, the avoidable loss of Andriy, a one-week-old baby who died because of a shortage of X-ray machines, is one Dmytro still struggles to reconcile.