By Canadian Press

‘We lost too many children’: Ukrainian heart doctor says admission to NATO is urgent

Jun 12, 2023 | 12:31 PM

KYIV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian doctor who was forced to treat open-heart surgery patients in a bomb shelter last year says he’s grateful for the assistance his country has received from Canada.

But Dr. Igor Mokryk, the head of cardiac surgery at the Heart Institute of Kyiv, says the best medicine would be to have Canada’s backing on Ukraine joining NATO. 

In an interview with The Canadian Press at his office in Kyiv on Monday, he said he would have loved to have spoken with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he made a surprise visit to the city on the weekend.

During his visit, Trudeau promised more weapons and fighter-pilot training but stopped short of fully supporting Ukraine becoming a NATO member.

“In the conversations around NATO, we’ve always been very, very clear that we absolutely think Ukraine should join NATO when the conditions are right for it,” the prime minister said.

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But Mokryk, 49, said the conditions are already right and it should have happened years ago.

“If Ukraine was in NATO, everything of what we have now wouldn’t have happened,” Mokryk said.

“This is the time at least to tell Ukraine that you are part of NATO. We have this terrible war already but we know we will win. But absolutely we do not want to have another war with Russia.”

Mokryk said if he had a chance to speak to Trudeau, he would thank him for the support but ask him to remember he’s also is a family man, just like many Ukrainians with children at risk. 

“Their safety really depends on if Ukraine really is in NATO or not. Is it part of a big family of nations who are really progressive and who help? We lost too many children. They are killed. That’s absolutely crazy.”

The Heart Institute received 30 boxes of personal protective equipment, dressings, catheters, syringes, surgical gowns and defibrillator electrodes from the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary last November. 

Dr. Paul Fedak, who is Ukrainian Canadian, was watching a social media post months ago of Mokryk taking patients down into a bunker as bombs were going off overhead and it made him think about how difficult things already are in the Canadian health-care system.

“I can’t even imagine what it would be like trying to care for these patients during a war,” he said.

Supplies from several countries are still coming in. There were pallets of unopened supplies in the hospital’s hallways.

Mokryk said things are better now. The power hasn’t been going out on a daily basis, the number of heart surgeries have returned to normal and staff no longer live at the hospital like they did for the first two months of the war.

The basement is still there for emergencies, with medical supplies on hand and a handful of cots just in case. 

Mokryk said he has come to view the war as a disease that needs to be treated.

“What we had in the beginning was an attack of the disease and we knew it was severe. We knew it’s going to kill us and we really didn’t know how big it was and we were diagnosing it,” he said.

“And now we learned much better on how to respond to it and to push it away and now we really know that we will win.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 12, 2023.

Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press